The 10th Edition scheduled for Aug. 27-30, 2021 at the Beijing Exhibition Center in Beijing, China has been postponed in a city-wide effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
The strong alliances and synergies resulting from this close cooperation with producing regions makes the popular exposition a benchmark in northern China by which other shows are measured. Attendees are highly qualified tea industry professionals and large-volume buyers including international representatives. A diverse show floor that includes every type of tea, plus processing and packaging machinery leads to many transactions and remarkable results.
The past nine years the Expo was co-organized by Pu’er city in Yunnan province, Xinyang city in Henan province, Lu’an city in Anhui province, Lincang city in Yunnan province, Huangshan city in Anhui province, Zunyi city in Guizhou province, Wuzhou city in Guangxi province, Xianyang city in Shanxi province, and Yiyang city in Hunan province, respectively.
The expo, which is approved by the Ministry of Commerce in China, is organized by the China Tea Marketing Association and the People’s Government of Xicheng District in Beijing.
Since 2012 the event has featured more than 3,000 exhibiting companies (90% are first-line brands), more than 1,000 media representatives generated nearly 30 million online searches. Visitors total 620,000, including 220,000 professional buyers. Exhibitors report a total of 7,282 projects, with turnover of RMB 5.9 billion. Tea delegations at the event are from a dozen countries including India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Argentina.
The expo annually attracts the best-known tea companies and tea brands in China. The 2021 exhibition covers 26,000 sq. meters with 600 companies participating. Brands include Zhejiang Tea Group, Xiangcha Group, Sichuan Tea Group, Dayi Group, Wuyi Star, Zhuyeqing, Zhang Yiyuan and Wu Yutai.
Education sessions spread tea knowledge and expose attendees to tea culture by showcasing local customs and heritage. A variety of tea cultural activities attract young and fashionable consumers seeking to better understand the tea industry.
Sessions also cover topics of interest to caterers, resort, and hotels operators, tea preparation and proper use of utensils, advice on selecting and properly utilizing water with an introduction to new style tea beverages. Many cross-border tea events are planned, revealing new trends that drive consumption.
The Beijing International Tea Expo has it all: popularity, extensive publicity, high standards, strong professionalism, a broad range of exhibition categories, international buyers, and good service.
Jorhat Tea e-Marketplace in Assam, India is the nexus of five major tea-growing districts with annual output of more than 200 million kg,
Tea Day e-Auction Highlights Boutique Teas
Buyers seeking quick turn-around of fresh tea from specialty and smallholder gardens in India bid record prices at a the first International Tea Day auction, the latest of 1.3 million kilos of tea traded since June 2020. All teas on offer were plucked May 21.
The e-Marketplace at Jorhat is cloud-based making it accessible to buyers around the world.
There are currently six auction centers in physical locations, each run by a separate committee which acts as the auction organizer, all sharing an electronic auction system pioneered by the Tea Board of India. About 500 million kg of tea out of India’s annual estimated at 1,350.
“We created India’s first e-marketplace for buying and selling bulk tea. Along similar lines, we want to develop an international e-marketplace where foreign buyers can directly buy fresh tea from the gardens in the shortest possible time with complete transparency” says mjunction managing director Vinaya Varma.
Vinaya Varma
The International Tea Day Special Auction on June 21 was organized by mjunction Services, India’s largest B2B e-commerce company. The e-Marketplace launched last year amidst the lockdown. India offers a wide bouquet of teas across the year and ships regularly to more than 90 countries. At a webinar on the occasion of International Day, Indian Tea Association Chairman Vivek Goenka said that India has set an export target of 300 million kg by 2023 — a 20% increase by next 2-3 years.
Mjunction is an equal joint venture of Tata Steel and SAIL (the Steel Authority of India), is India’s largest B2B e-commerce company and a leading e-marketplace for steel in the world. Since inception in 2001, mjunction has e-transacted over INRs 1,053,663 crore ($142 billion) on its various e-platforms (an Indian crore is currently valued at $135,000 USD).
Varma said there is a lot of excitement amongst stakeholders on the teas offered in the special auction and have got tremendous response and fetched some record prices. “More than 93% of the total teas on offer got sold. Buyers had logged in from Assam, West Bengal, Delhi, Gujarat, and Rajasthan,” he said.
Nilesh Divekar of Shangrila Enterprise, who purchased Pabhojan Orthodox at Rs 4,000 per kg, said he appreciates the efforts of the mjunction team to provide such a platform where best of the teas are available fresh and in small quantities without any hassles.
Most of the best marks of Upper Assam like Hookhmol, Lankashi, Diroibam, Aideobari Premium, Muktabari, Rungliting Tea Estate, Narayanpur Panbarry, Durgapur, Tirual, Arin, Kathonibari, Friends Tea and Pabhojan participated.
The Pabhojan Tea Estate orthodox tea pictured above brought a record INRs 4000 ($54 per kilo)
Pabhojan Orthodox tea was sold at a record price of INRs 4,000 per kg. Diroibam Speciality Green tea was sold at INRs 1000 per kg, and a Hookhmol CTC tea fetched INRs 510 per kg – also record prices in their respective categories.
Rakhi Dutta Saikia of Pabhojan Organic Tea Estate lauded mjunction’s efforts on the occasion. “I am very happy that Pabhojan has fetched a record price, and hope the mjunction platform continues the good work,” she said.
Dr. Nazrana Ahmed of Diroibam Tea Estate, whose Green Tea was sold at INRs 1,000 per kg, said, “Today’s special auction is of special significance to us, as we have received the highest bid for our Specialty Green Teas. We are happy with the professional approach of the mjunction team and the trust reposed on the platform by the buyers.”
He said the company is trying to make small tea growers’ tea available to the connoisseurs of tea worldwide.
“Our Jorhat office is in constant touch with the small tea growers segment. There is a lot of interest from STG to be part of our platform.
We are very well aware of their struggle and contribution to the tea industry in Assam as well as the rest of the country. “mjunction is also very well aware that many of these small tea growers are producing some of the finest handcrafted tea in the country. Some of the tea is also organic and there is a huge demand in the world market for such tea” he said.
He said in one year, it has been able to bring a lot of buyers and sellers who have been outside the purview of auctions till now. There are many first-time tea entrepreneurs who are now associated with our platform.
“We hold weekly sales. Our first sale was on June 1, 2020 and since then we have not dropped a single weekly sale. During the past year the e-Marketplace connected with hundreds of sellers and buyers across the country, fetched some record prices and received offerings of more than 1.3 million kg of tea from Assam, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. Nearly 300 stakeholders, consisting of major tea buyers and sellers, are registered in this tea e-marketplace.
“The founding principles and processes of our e-marketplace and Tea Board are different, so a comparison is not really possible,” he said.
The event organized by mjunction elicited positive response from buyers and sellers alike. Kamal Sharma and Pradeep Sharma, Directors of Tea World who purchased Hookhmol CTC from the platform at INRs 510 per kg, said, “With shorter cycle time, teas sold on the mjunction platform are the freshest. We are pleased to have bagged Hookhmol. We have had our own packet with brand name Shree Mangalam since 2002, and we are committed to give our customers the best of Assam tea.”
“While the pandemic hit the industry adversely, it has also given us a chance to let go of inefficient and archaic systems. If we look around in the last one year, the adoption of technology and digital platforms has been wide, deep and rapid. Similarly, the industry leaders must think of ways to include technology in plantation, manufacturing, trading etc while focussing on delivering quality produce.
“I am optimistic about the Indian tea industry picking up using new-age processes and technologies,” he said.
“Many specialty tea producers from North East India have approached our Jorhat office for inclusion. We are going to have separate catalogues for specialty teas and we are expanding our buyer base of Speciality teas” he said.
He said the company will shortly be introducing Buyer and Seller Finance. Again this will be a first of its kind in the industry, as this shall be provided through the platform in a transparent manner. “We are also planning a B2B bulk packet platform, where single-origin and other packeteers may directly sell to retailers across the country, without intermediaries,” he added.
The company is focused on bringing down the sales cycle-time and making freshly produced tea available in the market, directly from the producing region in the shortest possible time. “We want to make the supply-chain efficient, and ease up the working capital burden of the stakeholders,” Varma added.
THIRST The International Round Table for Sustainable Tea, is launching a three-year program to analyze the root causes of human rights breaches in the tea industry and come up with an action plan for how to solve them. This will take the form of a Human Rights Impact Assessment of the global tea sector.
Tea workers experience a range of working conditions from ideal to difficult to inhumane.
A Solution-Oriented Approach
By Aravinda Anantharaman
A Human Rights Impact Assessment is defined by the Danish Institute for Human Rights as “a process for identifying, understanding, assessing and addressing the adverse effects of a business project or business activities on the human rights enjoyment of impacted rightsholders such as workers and community members.” The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights recommend that businesses inform themselves about human rights in their own operations and in their supply chains.
THIRST founder Sabita Banerji, who also consults with organizations like Oxfam and Living Wage Foundation, writes that “The term ‘Human Rights Impact Assessment’ makes people think of the negatives of what’s happening in human rights, in the supply chain. I prefer to think of it as a human rights impact analysis.”
The program sets out to look at the conditions for workers and farmers, the cause of problems, and what can be done to address the problems. Banerji calls it a ‘constructive solution-oriented approach’ which has four focus areas:
Create an evidence base across tea-growing regions by consolidating available research and identifying under-documented regions.
Conduct in-depth studies where there are gaps and provide a global picture of the interdependencies of tea.
Interrogate the tea value chain from producer to consumer, and the context within which it operates, to understand what levers and dynamics within the tea trading system might be driving human rights breaches.
Convene roundtable meetings of stakeholders in the tea sector to use that evidence to decide what changes are needed and act on them.
Sabita Banerji
“A drought in Kenya will send prices up in India and vice versa. So how can we look at the whole value chain from the producer to the consumer and everyone in between – the traders, the packers, the branders and the retailers, the auction house. How can we look at how trading is done to understand are the dynamics within that value chain and the distribution of value along the chain to see if these are driving some of these breaches of human rights?”
The program will look into:
The context within which the tea industry functions: the legislative framework, the international standards, the ILO conventions that different countries have signed up for, new laws like the one that will soon be passed by the EU making it compulsory for companies to do human rights due diligence studies in their supply chains, in addition to consumer trends and the role they are playing in drawing ethics and human rights into the conversation on consumption.
Initiatives, programs, and business models, and how they have worked. THIRST will study both experimental and traditional models to see what can be borrowed, replicated, adapted, and scaled to bring systemic change to the industry.
Ways to bring civil society and the industry to look at human rights challenges together, find solutions together, and then work together to put those solutions into practice.
Central to the program is the dialogue with producers. Adds Banerji, “I think the pattern so far has been for people who are concerned about human rights, raising these issues as they see them but framing it in quite a hostile way. That puts the producers on defensive mode. And I think in any case, the tea industry’s tea estate model was always set up in a very kind of a defensive way. There isn’t a tradition and a culture of listening really. I believe, and I hope, that this study will be able to look into this more and see if it’s true that the producers are themselves trapped in a system, which makes it difficult for them to respect human rights, actually. I’ve often found, in the other Human Rights Impact Assessments that I’ve done, that very often that the problem is that the farmers are not getting sufficient price for their produce to, to be able to fulfil the human rights requirements of their workers or the small farmers supplying them. I suspect the same will be true in the tea sector.”
The program is ambitious and not without challenges. As Banerji points out, in the past, when activists, academics, or trade unions have pointed to the problems, producers have been defensive. There is a reluctance to engage in dialogue as much of it begins with criticism of their functioning. THIRST’s challenge will be in achieving the balance between earning the trust of companies and balancing that with grassroots activists. “There is a lot of mistrust on both sides. So it’s going to be tricky getting them to a point where they feel they can at least have a conversation with each other and hear each other’s side of the story and point of view to try to find a way to move forward,” she says.
The program follows a tried and tested model, which begins with:
Assessment (year 1) : A desk review of available literature to get an understanding of the structure of the industry and the dynamics of its working. Analysis (year 2) : Interview people in the industry, including workers, farmers, trade unionists, civil society, campaigners, company managers and owners to understand their perspectives. Action (year 3) : As an independently funded human rights assessment, the program will put out a set of recommendations and convene working groups with the industry and civil society to enable these recommendations into action.
Says Banerji, “While some recommendations will be specific to specific geographies and may result in a working group for that particular country or region, there will be other recommendations that apply globally. And that’s why this is a Human Rights Impact Assessment of the global tea sector. Because all the elements are so interdependent. I think part of the problem up to now is that the issues have been looked at in some narrow geographical way whereas I believe that the root causes of those problems are systemic. They are industry-wide.”
The program begins in July 2021, and an Advisory Committee will be formed with a representative range of stakeholders from tea-producing countries and tea buying companies.
THIRST invites civil society, academics, funders, companies and other tea stakeholders to be part of this study, in the following ways:
1. Become a civil society partner in the study, helping to steer, shape and deliver it with THIRST and other partners
2. Contribute research reports and data, conduct new field research in under-studied areas and/or contribute analysis of the global tea market and trading system, take part in roundtable meetings to discuss findings and resulting actions
3.Volunteer to share corporate views and information to ensure that the study is well balanced and presents all views fairly and accurately
4. Become a funder to enable the study to be as deep and far-reaching as possible
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
The FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) programme has designated almost 60 sites as dynamic spaces where culture, biodiversity and sustainable agricultural techniques coexist, proving to be vital to achieve food security and generate livelihoods.
China, Korea and Japan have four tea cultivation sites designated as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems by FAO. These sites that represent evolving systems of human communities in an intricate relationship with their territory, cultural and agricultural landscape.
2021 Program
Re-emphasizing the call from the Intergovernmental Group on Tea to direct greater efforts towards expanding demand, particularly in tea-producing countries, where per capita consumption is relatively low, and supporting efforts to address the declining consumption in traditional importing countries, the General Assembly decided to designate 21 May as International Tea Day.
The first observance of the International Tea Day was celebrated in a virtual event that will brought together the world’s top tea exporting and importing countries as well as major producing countries where tea cultivation is an important source of revenues. Watch here the recording of the celebration.
Harnessing benefits for all from field to cup — 21 May 2020 at 14:00 hours (Rome time). Watch the webcast. The first International Tea Day was celebrated virtually and was opened by FAO Director-General,QU Dongyu.
Tea for Sustainable Development — 21 May 2020 at 10:00 hours (ETD). Watch the webcast. An interactive dialogue with Permanent Representatives from major tea-consuming and producing countries, co-organised by FAO and the Mission of China.
On May 21st, viewers around the world will tune in to 11 hours of talks with tea professionals from the tea lands. The free event, which is streamed on YouTube, is the creation of Shabnam Weber, president of the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada. Click to register.
SofaSummit organizer Shabnam Weber, Tea and Herbal Association of Canada
UK Tea and Infusions Association
The UK Tea and Infusions Association is marking International Tea Day – with a series of podcasts called “Around the world in 80 teas – the first few stops” in which Dr. Sharon Hall, Chief Executive of the UK Tea and Infusions Association, and her co-host, Will Battle, author of the World Tea Encyclopaedia, discuss some very different teas from around the world that are all produced from Camellia Sinensis tea bushes.
“Our aim is to celebrate the wonderful beverages that can be made from the Camellia Sinensis plant. We will be publishing the podcasts in the run up to International Tea Day, on 21st May, said Hall.
“One of the great joys of tea is being able access a wealth of variety from around the world at very accessible prices. It has been great to celebrate this diversity by shining the spotlight on a few favourites” writes Battle.
China – Oolong- Tieguanyin and Big Red Robe– the Floral teas
India – Assam second flush – the Strong tea
UK – English Breakfast Tea – the Wake-up tea
Ceylon Artisanal Tea Association
The Sri Lanka Tea Board and the Colombo Tea Traders Association are showcasing that country’s artisanal tea makers during an International Tea Day webinar at 5:30 pm in Colombo (8 am EST US | 2 pm CEST EU | 8 pm Japan).
Participants include
Anil Cooke, chairman of the Ceylon Tea Roadmap 2030.
The State of Misiones, in cooperation with the government of Argentina and local tea firms, will host a virtual tea conference on Friday, May 21 from 8:30 am until 2 pm (UTC-03:00). The meeting is hosted here (webex). Attendance is free.
The half-day working conference is divided into two blocks, the first addresses tea in the domestic market with sessions on sustainable production, technology and local markets. The second block is a discussion of tea exports and trends in international markets.
Speakers include Octavio Ingaramo, director of INTA (National Institute of Agricultural Technology); Carolina Okulovich, owner of The Tea Route, a tea retailer and producer. Okulovich is the daughter of the largest tea producer in Argentina and president of the Center for Tea Makers.
Patricia Parra worked for the national Agricultural Ministry specializing in tea production. Luciana Imbrogno is Secretary to the Agricultural Minister. Helmuth Kunmritz is an engineer and independent tea producer. Lic. Emiliano Lysiak works at INTA Misiones, the state institute conducting tea research in Misiones. Edson Teramoto is an agricultural certification coordinator.
Horacio Bustos is founder of Gyokuro Circulo Argentino del Té and John Smagula, Assistant Dean, Graduate & International Programs; Associate Professor, China Rule-of-Law Program at Temple University. Dan Bolton is publisher of Tea Journey Magazine and host of the weekly Tea Biz podcast.
The State of Misiones, in cooperation with the government of Argentina and local tea firms, will host a virtual tea conference on Friday, May 21 from 8:30 am until 2 pm (UTC-03:00). The meeting is hosted here (webex). Attendance is free.
The half-day working conference is divided into two blocks, the first addresses tea in the domestic market with sessions on sustainable production, technology and local markets. The second block is a discussion of tea exports and trends in international markets.
Speakers include Octavio Ingaramo, director of INTA (National Institute of Agricultural Technology); Carolina Okulovich, owner of The Tea Route, a tea retailer and producer. Okulovich is the daughter of the largest tea producer in Argentina and president of the Center for Tea Makers.
Patricia Parra worked for the national Agricultural Ministry specializing in tea production. Luciana Imbrogno is Secretary to the Agricultural Minister. Helmuth Kunmritz is an engineer and independent tea producer. Lic. Emiliano Lysiak works at INTA Misiones, the state institute conducting tea research in Misiones. Edson Teramoto is an agricultural certification coordinator.
Horacio Bustos is founder of Gyokuro Circulo Argentino del Té and John Smagula, Assistant Dean, Graduate & International Programs; Associate Professor, China Rule-of-Law Program at Temple University. Dan Bolton is publisher of Tea Journey Magazine and host of the weekly Tea Biz podcast.
Program
8.45 hs. | Articulacion Institucional
9.30 hs. | Nuevos Mercados y Exportaciones
10.10 hs. | Produccion Sostenible del Te
11.20 hs. | Tendencias
12.30 hs. | Conclusiones y cierre
Join by video: Dial [email protected] or dial You can also dial 173.243.2.68 and enter meeting number 173 789 6796 (attendance is free)
