Dan Bolton
Dan Bolton, STiR editor
Transformation takes time.
Like an embryo in the egg there is a period of concealment and contemplation prior to hatching plans that will transform past accomplishments into something new.
The issue tells the story of pioneers like Hong Peng in China, who saw opportunity in the rocky terroir of Wuyuan where growers resisted government mandates imposed in 1949 that led to extensive use of pesticides, herbicides, and nitrogen fertilizer. Mr. Hong’s tea company has prospered from teas produced by the Dazhangshan Organic Farmers Assocation which in 2001 became the first Fair Trade certified exporter in China to send EU and USDA certified organic teas to the west. His vision sees beyond profit: “we realized that a cooperative system of family farms was very similar to a fair trade model. It is not just about profit. There is democracy and transparency. They can decide as a group where [profit proceeds] can be used,” said Hong. (See Jiangxi Wuyuan Dazhangshan Organic Food Co.)
Edgard Bressani of Brazil is embarking on the challenge of a lifetime. An accomplished marketer, coffee entrepreneur and former v.p. of the Brazilian Specialty Coffee Association, Bressani and his partners dream one day of returning the most southern of Brazil’s coffee growing regions into a stronghold of specialty farms. There was a time when growers near the Tropic of Capricorn routinely won top prices for their Cup of Excellence awarded coffees.
Bressani is determined to return these coffees to greatness at a time when Brazil is undergoing a dramatic change in climate across the great expanse of coffee farms in Minas Gerais. To retain its rank as the top coffee producer in the world Brazil must explore and cultivate new regions with lower temperatures at higher altitude and more reliable rainfall.
His tool of transformation is long-term partnerships with small growers. “Partnerships have to be sustainable and always offer a win-win situation in order to last,” he said.
Perhaps the most striking example is Larry Luxner’s revealing look at the re-emergence of Georgian tea in western markets. Luxner traveled to Georgia in June. (See Georgian Tea.)
Once the fourth largest producer of tea in the world, Georgia, a war-torn satellite among the remnants of Soviet Russia, is determined to once again cultivate high quality specialty teas for export. Georgia is situated along the shores of the Black Sea at the crossroads of Western Asian and Eastern Europe. Tea cultivation did not begin there until the 19th century but steadily improved under the direction of a wealthy merchant allied with Chinese experts.
In 1892 Konstantin Popov traveled to China to study large-scale production and returned from Guangdong with a team headed by Lao Junzhou. Mr. Lao experimented with cultivars and refined the processing of “Caucasian Tea” winning the gold medal at the 1900 Paris World Expo. Quality declined during the Soviet era and by the 1960s two-kilo bricks of tea, steamed and pressed from leaves harvested by diesel-driven combines, were sold for about 60-cents to Mongolia, the only export market outside the USSR available to growers.
“The industry was dead. But now we have a private company, and I have great hope that the industry will come back again,” says Kakha Nachkebia at Nagomari tea plantation.
See Georgian Tea for an uplifting tale of how tea growers persisted in returning their teas to prominence despite purges, economic collapse and civil war.
Hong Peng (in China) and Edgard Bressani (in Brazil) and Kakha Nachkebia (in Georgia) each tell a story of determination inspiring to all.