- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE tea industry of Kenya is facing a challenge and some of the African country’s tea growers are shifting to other crops like pineapple as climate change threatens its tea plantation, Africanews reported along with AFP earlier in July.
Kenya’s tea industry contributes about four per cent of its gross domestic product.
The eastern African nation once enjoyed perfect tea-growing conditions but environmental adversity has put the world’s largest black-tea exporter in trouble. The challenges include rising temperatures, floods and drought.
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Gabriel Mwatha Mbugua is one such affected tea farmer and he has shifted to growing pineapples.
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“This tea was planted when I was young, 1959. During that time, we had a lot of rain, everything here looked like forest. So, there was a lot of rain and this tea was being plucked four times a month, after every seven days. These days when we moved on, the climate changed. When it changed, we are not getting as much rain as we used to get then. So now, instead of four times, we do it two times. Now, you see, you get half of what you were getting before. Therefore, I decided to change with the changing times, and I moved to pineapples because pineapples don’t need much rain,” Mbugua was quoted as saying in the report.
A report in May by Charity Christian Aid said that by 2050, the changing climate will badly hit Kenya’s tea production and its production conditions will be reduced by more than a quarter, hurting the farmers and workers.
“We have reports saying that by 2050, the area that we are growing tea is going to like be half of what there is. And so, that means that areas currently that are growing tea, farmers that are depending on tea, are going to increasingly become more vulnerable as the climate continues to change. The area is also going to be unsuitable in terms of the soils, suitability of the soils, and also the rainfall amounts,” Veronica Ndetu, climate change expert at Kenya’s ministry of agriculture, livestock and fisheries said, according to the report.
The Christian Aid report suggested curbing emissions to prevent climate change accelerating the harm caused to the tea-growing regions.
But the tea-growers are already witnessing a change for the worse.
