In a recent report by Gwadar Pro, China stated that it will be providing Pakistan with enhancing tea production in Pakistan through its slope planting technology.
According to the Director of National Tea and High-Value Crops Research Institute, Dr. Abdul Waheed:
“The biggest challenges that the Pakistan tea industry faces is that the price of fresh tea leaves is too low compared with other countries. It takes around 6 to 7 years for tea trees to grow and start its yield. The farmers cannot wait for that long, they need earnings for their daily living. Secondly, our farmers have less amount of landholding. They just have 3 to 4 kanals of land. We should increase the price so that the farmers can happily process tea and supply it to our factories.”
Moreover, Dr. Abdul believes that similar to other countries Pakistan should have a special area for tea planting as he mentioned in the following statement:
“All the countries that have grown tea like Kenya, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Brondi or other countries have fixed a special area for tea. In Kenya, they called the army to protect that land. They did not let anyone cultivate other crops there other than tea. We have had a meeting on this with the government but haven’t got the final approval is still left. This time, we are introducing a cluster-based system, in which we have 121 clusters.”
In a nutshell, through this cluster-based system, the production of tea plants quality-wise will be much better and will meet a much higher demand consumer-wise. However, in regards to the consumers on the domestic level, Mr. Naeem Ahmed, Assistant Technical Officer stated the following:
“Right now, the tea produced in our country is not enough for the domestic requirement. If we establish a Tea Board, we can use the forest and hilly areas for growing tea. Government should get involved in the process of commercialization and makes policies. Like in Turkey, they have a state reserved for only growing tea. Due to a large number of cultivation fields, they also get lots of revenue. We also need machinery for tea cultivation.”
Apart from this, Mr. Naeem believes that since China is quite enormous in tea export a partnership or collaboration between China and the Pakistan government in order to get more machinery and experience from them would be advised.
