Vahdam India this week donated $50,000 to launch a fundraiser as part of #RiseTogetherForIndia, a COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. Donations will assist the non-profit Doctors for You deliver relief services across India. The company seeks to mobilize tea drinkers worldwide to set up temporary COVID treatment facilities, acquire oxygen cylinders and concentrators and facilitate rapid vaccination efforts. India reported more than three million on new COVID cases in the past two weeks. Eighteen million are currently infected.
Funds totaled $86,000 from 225 donors with 14 days remaining in the campaign.
Doctors for You 100 bed COVID Care Facility at Shehnai Banquet Hall, New Delhi
Doctors For You
Covid-19 has emerged as a pandemic affecting the entire globe. This has tested public health preparedness to the optimum level even in developed countries who are still struggling to deal with the situation. In India as of 30 April 2021 there were 18.8 million cases of Covid-19 reported with 208,000 deaths.
Covid-19 has created fear and made us realize how bad this can turn out to be for the poorest, for those who will lose their livelihood, or those who wouldn’t know what to do to save themselves when the virus has reached someone close to them. It has also put additional strain on the already challenged healthcare system.
Doctors for You is operating 15 locations including 45-bed rural Covid Care dedicated Hospital (CCDH) in Anekal, Karnataka and another in Yelahanka General Hospital a which is 33-bed facility having 3 HDU beds and 30 oxygen beds.
WHO, UNICEF and other organizations are rushing staff and supplies to India to help fight the crushing tide of new cases. UNICEF is delivering critical oxygen concentrators and diagnostic testing systems, hygiene supplies and PPE kits to protect health care workers.
The Red Cross is responding with disaster resources including the delivery of medical supplies and emergency services across India. In March Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Chairman of the Indian Red Cross Society inaugurated a Nucleic Acid Testing (NAT) Testing Facility at the IRCS NHQ Blood Centre. He also inaugurated three fully equipped vehicles, including two blood collection vans which would be used to hold blood camps and add blood units to the Red Cross Blood Centre.
Hospitals urgently need oxygen cylinders and concentrators across India. Mission Oxygen is a crowd funded volunteer effort organized by 250 young entrepreneurs to raise funds to locate and distribute thousands of concentrators and cylinders the fund had raised $3.8 million from 28,000 donors as of the first of May.
A worker a Jalinga Tea Estate in South Assam making biomass pellets from tea waste to fuel tea dryers
India’s first carbon-neutral tea estate is constructing the country’s most sustainable tea factory.
Contractors at the Jalinga Tea Estate in South Assam, India’s largest organic tea grower, will complete India’s first zero-emission tea factory in July. With a capacity of 900 metric tons, the solar-powered factory is a large-scale model of efficiency using pellet-fired dryers, improved composting, biochar, and biomass gasification. Jalinga is India’s only Soil & More Impacts certified CO2 neutral estate.
The factory is jointly financed through the Jalinga Climate Tea Research Foundation (JCTRF), a partnership between Jalinga Tea Estate and Atmosfair, a German non-profit committed to reducing CO? emissions by promoting, developing, and financing renewable energy projects in more than 15 countries.
Jalinga has produced organic tea since 2004 at this organic certified factory.
Patrizia Pschera, Atmosfair’s Manager of Climate Mitigation Projects, writes that Jalinga “is making great efforts to minimise CO2 emissions and to make tea cultivation sustainable.”
JCTRF is developing and testing climate-friendly ways of growing and processing tea while promoting adaptation to changing climate conditions, she explained. “The aim is to establish a self-sustaining concept for the climate friendly and ecological cultivation of tea that can be transferred to tea gardens all over Assam,” according to Pschera who authored a case study on the project published on the Atmosfair website.
Pschera praised the estate for “making well thought-out and far-reaching changes to its production, which goes further than buying CO2 neutrality through certificates.”
In May, Atmosfair will visit Jalinga with reporters and a camera team from ZDF, a German TV channel making a documentary.
Jalinga Director Ketan Patel said the factory is half-finished and would be complete with solar panel installation by July. “It will run on 100% biomass pellets and briquettes and replace coal completely. Electricity will be generated through solar panels,” he said.
The factory will cost €300,000 ($360,000) to build and equip; an investment split equally between Atmosfair and Jalinga.
“This is my most passionate endeavor to date,” said Patel, a long-time advocate of Earth-friendly endeavors on the 650-hectare estate. Jalinga is a third-generation family business farmed organically since 2004. In 2018 Jalinga Tea Estate received the North American Tea Conference’s “Sustainability Award” presented annually.
The estate has adopted several climate-friendly social initiatives. Workers are supplied low-emission cookstoves instead of using firewood to improve air quality within dwellings, Patel explained, a simple innovation that reduces deforestation and improves the health of workers and their families.
“Jalinga is a demonstration site, we intend to commercialize the technology and share it with the whole tea industry,” said Patel.
“Atmosfair will look at the carbon emissions in the factory and develop carbon credits and take these back into the EU. They sell these carbon credits to airlines, government, etc.,” he said, adding, “It’s a win-win situation for the industry and environment.”
Pellet-Fired Dryers
The Indian government has the mandate to cut carbon emissions. One of the biggest problems in the industry is the reliance on coal to fuel dryers. Burning fossil fuels leads to the release of pollutants into the atmosphere. The availability of coal is also an issue. Coal mining is now illegal in Meghalaya, raising costs and making coal less available. Patel said that coal leaves a residue on tea plants, soot that is not suitable for human consumption.
Jalinga will rely on tea waste, an excellent fuel when converted to biomass pellets. Prunings, waste leaves, and grass from weeding have relatively low ash content and generate 20 MJ of energy per kilo.
“Many crop residues remain unused every year. Their decay in local dumps produces the greenhouse gas methane. At the same time, tea plantation operators dry the tea leaves with coal, releasing CO2. The JCTRF will test how plantation operators can use a pelleting machine to compress crop residues to use them as fuel instead of fossil coal,” said Patel. “We will be doing extensive research on climate-friendly ways to produce tea, both in the plantation & the factory so that the whole chain can lead to zero carbon tea production,” he said.
Toward Carbon Zero
The garden is also doing extensive R&D on a carbon removal program that will drastically improve soil fertility, explains Patel. Jalinga has been using compost from a special composting method (Novcom compost) in combination with manure to fertilize the tea plants for more than 15 years.
“We are continuously trying out new ways of creating compost with green matter available in the estate. We have an in-house lab that tests the compost, compost water, and soil regularly for microbial growth, microbial diversity. Nitrogen content is also measured off-site,” he said.
In a Facebook video, Patel explains that Jalinga follows the three pillars of climate-smart tea:
sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and income
adopting and building resilience to climate change
reducing and removing greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions
“Our policies are aligned with the 17 goals developed by the United Nations that aim for a better and more sustainable future for all,” he says.
Jalinga supplies private-label tea to more than 150 5-star hotels with exports to the UK, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, and soon Russia, Australia, and Japan.
Next up is a brand launch.
Meeting the India Tea Board mandate to produce earth-friendly tea at a profit while enhancing India’s ability to market quality tea ? Jalinga is leading the way.
“Currently tea needs a quarter million metric tons of Nitrogen from non-renewable methane; 138,000 metric tons of Potassium from fossil sources and 27,500 metric tons of Phosphorus to dig from fast-depleting reserves. Conventional farming has the tools to meet demand, but supplies are fast running out. Peak phosphorus comes in 2030,” according to Nigel Melican, founder Teacraft.
Early harvests in China, India, and Kenya sent new teas to market early this year – a fortunate head-start. Unlike last year, labor availability is good despite COVID-19 restraints, tea regions report fine weather, and orderly processing is raising expectations of a bountiful crop. In this segment Jason Walker, spokesperson for Firsd Tea, the US division of the largest green tea supplier in the world, discusses two remaining challenges impeding timely tea delivery.
Jason Walker on obstacles to timely tea delivery.Map shows ships idled for days waiting a berth at ports in Long Beach and Los Angeles, Calif.
Finally Under Way
Early harvests in China, India, and Kenya sent new teas to market early this year – a fortunate head-start. Unlike last year, labor availability is good despite COVID-19 restraints, tea regions report fine weather, and orderly processing is raising expectations of a bountiful crop. Two hurdles remain. Transport is stretched to the breaking point as reinvigorated economies stir from pandemic weariness. The second hurdle is cost. Wholesalers, retailers, and importers that last year bore the weight of spiking prices must now make up for lost earnings. Expect significant price increases for both specialty and commodity teas for the foreseeable future.
Tea Biz: COVID-19 and the chaos of lockdowns this time last year presented unique delivery challenges. Describe how the logistical hurdles differ for the 2021 harvest.
Jason Walker: We did see locations and origins that either could not get any tea out at all, or we saw that they could not get anything out on their regular schedule. There were multiple variations of disruption that were happening last year.
For example: Some growing areas in China saw a shortage of workers to harvest the spring crop. Then you may have packing or processing facilities that were locked down or running a skeleton crew. On top of that- even if your workforce could pluck, process, and pack on schedule, shipments could still be hindered
This year we are seeing a more steady flow. We are seeing harvests started earlier. Compared to last year things look like they’re much more on track. Especially in terms of harvest and processing/packing
In October the dollar costs of shipping really started to ratchet up.
Things were behind schedule.Then we started to see there was an inadequate supply of either ships or containers. Things were piled up because of ports that had been closed. Port closures caused shipping routes to get rearranged, and it took time to re-position and resume normal flow.
Then you had increased demand for online retail. Lots of new equipment and personal items were getting shipped. People who used to spend their money on a on a dinner out now buying exercise equipment and things like that. You just have more stuff trying to get on the water at the same time.
It takes months for all that to shift back into what it was. Containers were not even available for weeks sit at ports waiting for days or weeks just to get loaded onto a ship.
I tracked one of our ship’s on Vessel Finder just to see where it was day by day.
I had heard the stories of logjams at LA and Long Beach ports, the online vessel tracking service let me see just how our shipments might be impacted. By taking a screenshot daily, I saw how our shipment waited in a line of ships offshore for about 7-8 days before being cleared to dock and unload.
Every single day we saw it just sitting there waiting its turn to get unloaded.
Then we began hearing stories that some of those ships were returning empty because the rates for East Asia into Western US were four times the going rate.
We are seeing still seeing some of that.
We had to share some of that burden of costs with our customers.
Tea Biz: In 2020 importers, wholesalers, and retailers eased the price shock for consumers by absorbing some of the sharp increase in transportation costs. This year prices are expected to rise with retailers promoting pre-orders and fewer free shipping offers. What advice can you offer to reduce the cost of transporting tea.
Jason Walker: We have been trying to encourage our customers and everyone out there to make their best projections that we can know roughly when you need it. That helps everybody along the line prioritizing the order. It also average out. You may pay higher rates now, but may be able to offset that later as the cost of things goes down and we all can adjust our prices.
Projections essentially help ease the strain on the logistics chain. Container shipments, warehouses, and truckers are better equipped to send and receive the right amounts of product while compensating for delays caused by a strained system. The alternatives are to either overprepare (potentially overwhelming the system), or under-prepare and risk being left without. We recognize it can be tough to make projections in these unparalleled circumstances but the benefits outweigh the costs. Depending on the size of the customer and their orders, clients are providing 6-month or quarterly projections. As a result we have seen fewer interruptions due to better planning. Observers in ocean freight, major ports, and domestic trucking all indicate the overall instability may continue until late spring or early summer.
Firsd Tea has been tracking and sharing updates we receive from logistics partners and sharing that via our newsletter and blog:
