Pashupatinagar (Ilam), Sept. 5: Since Nepali tea producers and exporters have long been facing hard times in exporting tea to India, which is the largest destination market of Nepali tea, entrepreneurs in Ilam district are looking for alternative markets. 

Nepal exports tea of various types worth about Rs. 8 billion a year, and Ilam is among the largest producers of tea. Jhapa, Ilam, Panchthar, Terhathum and Dhankuta are the major tea producing districts while Kavrepalanchok, Dolakha and Kaski have, of late, also started producing the cash crop. 

After India started curbing the cross-border trade of Nepali tea for the past many years on various pretexts, stakeholders in the tea sector have started looking for alternative solutions including the export of the product to third countries. 

A delegation of tea entrepreneurs of Ilam led by Dilliram Shrestha of Suryodaya Tea Produce Pvt. Ltd. has reached Kathmandu to initiate the export of Nepali tea to Sri Lanka and Dubai of the United Arab Emirates. Suryodaya Municipality and its Mayor Rana Bahadur Rai are supporting the initiative. 

Gopal Kattel, secretary of Suryodaya Tea, informed that the delegation met with the Ambassador of the UAE to Nepal, Abdulla Al Shamsi, and the Ambassador of Sri Lanka, Marshal Sudarshana Pathirana, and discussed the possibility of exporting Nepali orthodox tea to their respective country. 

Secretary at the Ministry of Finance Dinesh Kumar Ghimire and Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Amrit Bahadur Rai participated in the discussions with the diplomats, said Kattel.

Both ambassadors have pledged to begin an initiative to export Nepali tea to their countries. Kattel informed that the Ministry of Finance and Foreign Affairs have agreed to start an initiative through the ambassadors to export the Nepali tea there. 

Sri Lanka is one of the largest tea exporters in the world with annual exports amounting to 280 million kilograms. Mayor Rai informed that there was a discussion about Sri Lanka’s practice of exporting tea to the world markets. He said that even though Nepali tea is of good quality, Nepali entrepreneurs have been facing challenges every year and are unable to take it to the world market. 

“Therefore, we need to find alternatives to the traditional markets and export practices,” entrepreneurs said. 

Mayor Rai said that a company in Dubai is importing tea from 13 countries and selling the products in the local markets, so an initiative for the export of Nepali orthodox tea to Dubai has been started through the company at the initiative of the ambassador. “There was a discussion about how Nepal can get direct access to this country, which buys millions of tonnes of tea, and which method is suitable for it – diplomatic initiatives or efforts from the private businessmen,” said Rai.

Even though India has stopped the import of Nepali tea many times blaming low quality and high levels of pesticides, Nepali entrepreneurs have no alternative other than selling their products to the Indian markets. Until now, only 15 per cent of orthodox tea is consumed in Nepal, and the rest is exported to India and European countries. 

According to Nabin Koirala, tea technician at the Tea Expansion Plan of the National Tea and Coffee Development Board, of the 263 million kilos of orthodox tea produced in Nepal, only 6.75 million kilograms is produced in Ilam annually. 

According to the statistics from 2000 to 2015, the domestic market and per capita consumption of tea in Nepal is increasing at an annual rate of 11 per cent. However, it is estimated that the annual growth rate of tea consumption in Nepal may drop to 5 to 8 per cent by 2025 due to the increasing consumption of other competitive beverages including coffee.