Averting impending crisis of Assam tea

It is ironic that when the Assam tea industry should have had a gala celebration on International Tea Day to mark the completion of its 200 glorious years, two important stakeholders—small tea growers and Bought Leaf Factories (BLF)—are at loggerheads. The difference between the two has peaked, with the BLF owners setting a June 1 deadline for the government to come up with the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) over the issue of pesticide residue in green leaves supplied by STGs. The BLFs going ahead with their decision to stop procuring green leaf from STGs will only push the entire tea industry into a deep crisis. The current impasse is attributed to a notification on pesticide residue in made tea issued hastily by the Tea Board of India, though in the right earnest to prevent contamination in the teacup of the consumer. The BLFs have insisted that no pesticide is added to made tea, and whatever pesticide residue remains in it is due to its presence in green leaves supplied by STGs. The presence of pesticide residue can be confirmed only by laboratory tests, and rushing to the conclusion that green leaves supplied by every STG contain pesticide residue without conducting any tests will be erroneous. As green leaf supplied by different STGs gets mixed during processing, it becomes difficult for BLF owners to detect which lot of green leaf has a high pesticide residue above the prescribed level. It now appears that the Tea Board has not reflected on the availability of inadequate testing facilities to cater to the requirement of testing samples of green leaf from over 2.3 lakh STGs, including over 1.25 lakh STGs in Assam, while making it mandatory for the BLFs to ensure food safety standards of made tea. The policy gaps that precipitated the crisis are failures on the part of the Tea Board and the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to focus on ensuring food safety right from the plantation. The “Plant Protection Code—Policy on Usage of Plant Protection Formulations in Tea Plantations of India” issued by the Tea Board in February made it mandatory for tea manufacturers to test their products twice a year in six-month intervals from a National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) laboratory and upload the report on the FSSAI portal. The directive is important to prevent any adverse impact on the health of tea consumers, but it will require some time to build awareness among tea growers, including STGs, to ensure that pesticides and insecticides are used carefully so that the maximum residual limit is not exceeded in the course of green leaf production. The STG bodies, on the other hand, have raised the pertinent point that prohibited pesticides and insecticides are being sold in the market, which some small growers, for lack of awareness, are applying to their plantations. The Tea Board and FSSAI need to launch an intensive awareness campaign on the correct and safer usage of pesticides and insecticides on tea plantations so that green leaves with residues higher than the prescribed limit do not get supplied to BLF. From the perspective of consumer health, laboratory testing by manufacturers is a must to ensure that made tea does not contain any pesticide residue, but ensuring quality control at the plantation stage is the pragmatic approach to make a breakthrough in the current impasse and prevent it from recurring. A similar crisis was averted in April when BLFs agreed to resume procurement of green leaf from STGs following government intervention. The problem needs to be addressed permanently by strengthening laboratory testing facilities and building awareness about integrated pest management to prevent overuse or use of prohibited pesticides or insecticides. The BLFs have been insisting on STGS providing laboratory test findings of green leaf supplied by them, but the sheer number of small growers compared to the inadequate testing capacities of existing laboratories makes such an insistence unrealistic and problematic. The government and the Tea Board need to hold extensive consultations with the key stakeholders in the industry and evolve a mechanism to avert the impending crisis. A crash in the price of green leaf on account of non-procurement by BLFs may have a cascading impact and lead to the withdrawal of many STGs from green leaf production and a shift to alternative livelihoods. The consequences of such withdrawal will be on total tea production, as STGs account for more than half of the total tea production in the state. A concerted effort must be made by all stakeholders to avert the crisis and find workable solutions to fine-balance the health priorities of consumers, which cannot be compromised, and the economic interests of the tea industry and the state. Any arbitrary action, either by the Tea Board, FSSAI, or any stakeholder in the tea industry at this stage, will have irreversible consequences and must be avoided.