Food Part 3: What's in a Cup of Tea?

(Note: this is a continuation of a series. To start at the beginning go here: http://cheetahdevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/06/food-part-1-farmers-markets.html



How can a tea truck save the lives of babies? Come with me on a trip within Tanzania.

I left the relatively dry mesas around Iringa town and headed south into the highlands of Mfinga. It was about a one hour drive on a tarred road and we stopped and viewed some pottery on the way. One potter in particular really caught my eye as having some very beautiful work. I purchased two of his pieces.

When we left the tarred road we continued the ascent slowly by dirt lanes into the cool and moist hills. In another hour we were in the heart of tea country. The emerald green tea bushes were brilliant and seemed to sparkle even on the cloudy day.







The tea value chain has three main components. The tea is raised and picked primarily by small farmers who are organized into cooperative associations. It is bought from them by a processer, in this area a company called Mfindi Tea Company (MTC). MTC processes the green leaf and sells it to packers: in Tanzania, this includes the locally famous Chai Bora and in the rest of the world, Lipton, Tetley, Twinings and many other brand names. 95% of the tea grown in Tanzania goes for export. This is one of the relative successes of the local economy.

Lets start with the processor, MTC. In the picture below you can see the tea go from rough chop to fine chop to fermented brown. Although the line is moving very fast, there are containers that hold the tea for a while so that the tea moves down the line in a few hours.






Grades of tea are automatically sorted by machines and are picture here. The best is top left and the poorest is top right:

Heating requirements for the factory is supplied by wood, mostly eucalyptus trees, that are forested in the same area and is a renewable resource. One kilogram of tea requires 2.5 kilograms of wood:

Referred by the African Development Foundation, I met with Mkonge Tea Block Association. This is a group of 523 small farm families that together are one of the major suppliers to MTC.

Jointly they have accomplished much including establishing their own micro-finance cooperative, their own pharmacy, their own kindergarten, and their own tea nursery where we saw 1,200,000 tea plants growing! They are preparing to expand the area that they are cultivating and their joint effort has achieved this. Below you can see a picture from inside one of the nurseries. It is covered loosely with dried ferns to create a semi-shaded area. The high altitude makes for a cool climate so the business student from Tumaini is wearing my jacket.

Not only that, the members negotiate as a group to get a higher price from MTC. You can see the results of their efforts in the history of growing production and market value in the chart from their office bulletin board pictured below (notice the trends in the bottom two rows with both the negotiated price and production more in a dozen years):

Let’s put this success into clear perspective. They negotiate prices as a group from MTC. Starting July first, they will receive 145 shillings per kilogram (about $0.05 per pound!). This year they should exceed 2 million kilograms, at their highest price ever. This bumper income will equal about $425 per family per year. This just takes them from among the poorest of the world’s poor earning less than $1 per day to the next level earning less than $2 per day. The average family will make about $1.16 per day.

But this is more impressive when you take into account that this is the income before other commitments are paid like building the microfinance bank, planting the tea nursery or paying for fertilizer. This group’s ability to marshal its resources to benefit its future is amazing when you consider how small their income is to begin with.

To achieve this they work back-breaking hard bent over 18 inch bushes for long hours in their tea farms. At its peak season, they are often hand picking leaves until after midnight. The average family will pick almost 4.5 (American) tons of leaves per year. This is picking just the tips of each branch (as shown below). It takes a lot of leaves to make a pound, much less a ton. The leaves with an extended branch (as shown below) are of poor quality and too many of these can cause a load to be rejected. That’s Mr. Nyanzali (manager of Mkonge) on the left, a manager from the tea factory in the center, and a student from Tumaini University on the right. Behind them are tea leaves spread out for the first quick drying.

We still haven’t shown you how a tea truck can save the lives of babies. For that you’ll have to keep on reading. In our next installment we’ll also show you how a small investment can save babies, change the lives of 3000 people, and be sustainable.

To continue this series go here: http://cheetahdevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/06/food-part-4-working-together-works.html