The quantity of this season’s tea production is likely to fall slightly, said the Bangladesh Cha Sansgsad.
‘We think the output of tea will remain almost the same as last year or a little less,’ a top member of the growers’ organisation told New Age.
The tea plucking season starts in March and ends in December every year.
According to the official, tea production this year will total about 58 million kilograms by the end of December, only a trifle less than last year’s output of 59 million.
The member, who is also a top planter, said that the tea season this year started with drought-like weather which hampered the initial growth of the plants, and was then followed by too much rain in the middle of the season which also hampered growth.
The weather in the last few weeks was normal but this may not be enough to recover the growth lost throughout the year, said tea planters.
‘The tea industry has made a lot of effort in recent times to increase production as local demand is growing robustly, making it an attractive market for growers,’ the planter told New Age.
Stagnant production at a time of sharply rising demand is pushing up the prices of various sorts of tea.
The high prices that locals are willing to pay are also reducing tea export, a big change from the time when tea was one of the major exports of Bangladesh.
Tea export amounted to only $0.8 million in the first five months of the current fiscal year, a 70 per cent decline from the same period in the previous year.
In the last financial year ending in June, tea export amounted to only $5.6 million, which is less than 1 per cent of Bangladesh’s $16.4 billion export revenue.
In the mid-1970s, tea accounted for more than one-fifth of the country’s entire export proceeds.
‘When the industry is struggling to meet local demand and is getting good prices, export is no longer important,’ said Khandakar Ruhul Amin, chairman of the Khandakar Tea Company, a leading wholesaler.
Calculating the recent average retail price of tea in the local market, Amin, who is also a director of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry, estimated that the local market is now worth around Tk 2,000 crore or nearly $300 million.
He advised the government to extend more support to the tea industry, including the facilitation of private sector planters to increase production.
