BY DICKSON NG`HILY
27th December 2012
The sale which is 3.1 percent of total tea transacted at the auction was done between January and September this year at the average price of US$1.77 per kg positioning Tanzania seventh out of nine African countries at the auction.
According to media reports, it is said that the slowdown of Tanzania tea is due to the fact that the market setting does not favour her tea—such as 10m/- deposit as well as warehouse investment.
When this is seen as a blow to the country’s tea, on the contrary, the move has helped the local producers to benefit more from the crop sales elsewhere.
In an exclusive interview with this reporter recently, Nicholaus Mauya, a Tea Board of Tanzania (TBT) licensing and inspection manager acting as TBT director general said: “Honestly we are not doing badly.”
Mauya explained that the auction procedures and requirements seem to hold back Tanzania’s performance thus Tanzania tea producers prefer the direct sale.
“Storage and broker charges are inevitable at the auction, and when price declines, the broker tends to hoard till the price gets better. Therefore, the producers have to pay the charges, but with direct sales, the costs of storage, transport and brokers’ fee is born by the buyer,” he said.
“It is true that our tea sales in Mombasa are declining and this is due to the fact that the producers tend to consider direct sales better than the auction…with direct sale, the buyers are just coming themselves and this reduces operational costs that our producers would have met,” he said.
TBT statistics indicates that about US$26.7m was earned from April to September this year after 13,350.95 tons of tea were exported through the direct sale.
When reached for comment, Maulawa Mwakajala, a stakeholder in the country’s tea industry, had this to say: “More efforts are needed in order to make the crop profitable to the farmers as currently the processors are the ones benefiting from the produce.”
He added: “Apart from hearing how much has been earned from the exported tea, let us hear the way the crop has helped the farmers in poverty alleviation.”
On the other hand, Kenyan tea seems to attract more buyers as it sold at the average price of US$3.24 with 168,111 tons worth 871.5bn/-, thus leading the East Africa auction which dates back to the colonial period.
Other countries with their respective sales in brackets including Uganda (36,356.4 tons), Rwanda (13,220.72 tons), Burundi (6,590.74 tons), Mozambique (1,954.21 tons), Malawi (1,887.32 tons) and Madagascar (1,196 tons).
Mombasa’s tea auction is one of the 11 largest black tea auction sites across the globe, about 80 brokers and buyers participate in the transactions that take place every Monday and Tuesday.
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN
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