Foreign News
India’s Tea Industry Distress: Checks On Nepal Dont Address Issue
India’s decision to strictly implement quality control measures (officially termed as standard operating procedures SOP) on the import of Nepali tea, has been triggered by complex dynamics, external and internal.
Tea garden professionals who have dealt with every aspect of tea during their careers, told StratNewsGlobal that the SOP is not new, in fact it dates back to 2017 and had the laudable aim of ensuring no tea leaves entered the country that showed a certain level of pesticides and chemical residues.
Such pesticides reportedly, are widely used in Nepal (also Bangladesh) and are mixed up with tea leaves grown in India. The world famous Darjeeling tea for instance, has for many years been diluted with tea leaves brought in from Ilam in Nepal’s Koshi province bordering West Bengal.
But the SOP was never implemented and the buzz is vested interests on both sides of the border were making enormous profits. They were also filling a need because tea gardens like those in Dooars in West Bengal, have not invested in new bushes. The older the bushes the lower the yield which impacts quality.
It didn’t help that small tea growers in India use pesticides freely, damaging the soil but enabling them to compete with the larger gardens that because of their size, invited closer scrutiny from the authorities. Small growers produce 50% of tea sold at auctions, so they cannot be ignored.
With the SOP now in place, the tea community in West Bengal is cheering but what about replacing older bushes with new ones?
“Planting new bushes is a costly business,” a retired tea garden manager from Dooars told StratNewsGlobal, “and the industry wants government subsidies that would help them reduce the cost of replanting. But there’s no word from the government on that score yet.”
Subsidies have not been available to the tea industry since 1990. In fact, many planters fault the government constituted Tea Board for not doing enough to promote Indian tea and Indian brands.
There are other concerns. Many tea gardens have been taken over by front men of politicians and this is particularly acute in West Bengal where, it is alleged, people close to former chief minister Mamata Bannerjee control tea gardens.
“Implementing the SOP therefore seems to have served a dual purpose,” said another former tea planter. “To stop the import of Nepali tea, which is now subject to quality tests that take time. It also prepares the ground for a larger crackdown on tea gardens controlled by Bannerjee’s people where it is suspected black money is hidden.”
While this internal politics plays out, where does that leave Nepal? Media in that country claims that over a thousand kilos of Nepali tea is lying in Indian warehouses awaiting clearance by the quality control authorities that could take two weeks.
There are concerns the tea could spoil or become unfit for consumption resulting in huge losses for Nepali growers. The suspicion is India wants to stop the import and consumption of Nepali tea in the country.
“The tea bushes in Illam are younger, so the production levels are higher and the tea leaves are of excellent flavour,” a tea planter in Bhadrapur, Nepal, said.
The importing is being done by Indian traders who buy the tea leaves at lower rates and send it on to Nagpur and other places where it is processed to make different brands of tea.
Nepali tea planters say only 1% of the tea they produce goes to India, the rest finds markets in Europe and elsewhere. Ilam tea, for instance, is highly favoured in Germany. But even at 1% the impact of the ban is problematic with gardens and processing factories in trouble.
Is there a larger message India is sending? Nepali planters are speculating about the timing of India’s ban, which comes three months after the government of Balen Shah took office. Is this a subtle hint to the new prime minister to make the pilgrimage to Delhi, as has been the practice for so many years? Watch this space.
