Tea harvest targets may be missed

TEA PRODUCTION in Kenya, the world’s biggest exporter of the black variety of the leaves, may miss the government’s targeted 25 percent increase this year as an extended dry spell damages the crop. Coffee output will also be hurt. The La Niña weather phenomenon, which causes dryness in eastern Africa, is replacing the rain-inducing El Niño effect that resulted in heavy rainfall from October to December and helped boost tea output in the central and Rift Valley growing regions by more than a third in the first eight months of 2016 from a year earlier. La Niña might cut precipitation in the final three months of this year, and “the tea leaves are becoming dry and falling off ”, Johnson Irungu, the Agriculture Ministry’s director of crops, said in an interview on Monday. Production volumes shrank after the bumper harvest in the first quarter, meaning the industry might fall short of a 500 million-kilogram government target for the year, he said. The drought in east Africa’s biggest economy, which relies on exports of tea as its biggest source of foreign exchange after diaspora remittances, meant about 1.3 million people in almost half of Kenya’s 47 counties were facing food insecurity, the ministry said last week. While farmers used irrigation in times of low rainfall, dams and other water sources were drying up, causing concern especially for small scale-farmers, who accounted for 60 percent of Kenya’s tea production, Irungu said. – Bloomberg