Some Factors Affecting Tea Production in Pakistan

The nature of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, is such thatcertain natural factors heavily influence where it can be grown and howproductive it will be. Among these factors, rainfall, temperature, andsoil quality (particularly, drainage) seem to be the most important andhave limited tea production essentially to South and Southeast Asia(although an increasing amount, 5 to 6 per cent of world production inrecent years, is being grown in certain areas of Africa and LatinAmerica) [4, p. 77; 3, p. 50]. The climate of East Pakistan is suitablefor tea, and the hills of the Sylhet district in the northeast and theChittagong dis¬trict in the southeast have provided the required soiland drainage conditions to make Pakistan the seventh largesttea-producing country in the world. About 3 per cent of the world'soutput is grown in East Pakistan, and of this, over 90 per cent is grownin the Sylhet distiict alone. The recent position of tea in Pakistan, atleast in its broad outlines, is quite familiar even to the casualstudent of the Pakistan economy. Essentially static production, combinedwith rapidly increasing internal consumption, has resulted in acontinual decline in exports during the past decade. These trends can beclearly seen in Figure 1. Exports of 34.13, 26.03, and 21.03 millionpounds in 1951/52,1954/55, and 1956/57, respectively, yielded earningsof Rs. 42.07 million, Rs. 55.78 million, and Rs. 51.43 million (about 3per cent of total export earnings), in these three years [13]. Duringthe past year (1963/64), tea exports have been nil. Whereas over 60 percent of total production was exported in 1951/52, essentially all teaproduced was consumed domestically in 1963/64. In light of theforeign-exchange shortage and the great need to expand exports, thePakistan tea "story" is an unhappy one, indeed.