'TEA' TIME STORY!-WOES OF THE GROWERS

Cultivation and processing of beverage crops like tea, coffee and cocoa are confined to small holdings and call for specialized skill and hard work to succeed. Like all other agricultural commodities, growers of these beverage crops are concentrated in the Third World countries and their major consumers are in the First World. Wildly fluctuating global prices are destroying these small scale plantations and with input costs becoming higher each passing day, their very survival has become a big question mark. Neither WTO nor special agencies like International Coffee Organization could do much to bring socour to these hapless segment of agriculture.

According to, a recent report, prices of tea have not kept pace with the inflation and this si causing misery to millions of growers across the world. "Have you ever wondered which is the cheapest beverage in the world? Even in India?" he asks. "Tea is cheaper than bottled water. Please go back and ask your grandmothers how much they paid for a kilo of tea, and you'll be surprised that today you are paying less than what your grans were paying 50 years back." Sentiments such as these are no doubt shared by the majority of the world's smallholders. Tea, coffee, cocoa, cotton and rice prices have all fallen in real terms over the past four decades, plunging 500 million smallholder families deeper into poverty while helping the developed world get richer".

Getting decent remunerative price for the crops farmers grow is a basic fundamental right and many governments have price support schemes to insulate the farmers from the vagaries of the market. When it comes to beverage crops the planters are left to the mercy of global speculators who decide the price based on certain considerations. Considering that crops like tea, coffee and cocoa do not have an independent consumer market and the growers have to depend on the organized processors for buying their crops, there is very little scope for influencing the prices at which they are sold. While in coffee and cocoa India is not a major player, Tea is a different story with India one of the largest exporters in the world and any distortion in market can affect millions of families engaged in the industry.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
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