Heavy rain boosts Kenya's tea production

Heavy rain in Kenya has boosted tea production after months of drought, with the last two months of 2009 seeing a 5.6 percent increase over the same period in the previous year, the biggest producer said on Monday. Kenya exports more black tea than any other producer globally and a fall in production catapulted its auction prices to record prices last year.
But Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) - a group of small scale farmers producing over 60 percent of the country's total output - saw output increase to 168.35 million kg in November-December 2009 from 159.42 million. "Production has gone up quite a bit because of the rains. We don't have complaints really," Fred Gori, KTDA's Corporate Affairs Manager, told Reuters in an interview.
The downpours over east Africa's biggest economy follow a drought that slashed food and hydroelectricity production, pushed inflation up and caused starvation in some areas. The rains have also been damaging. At least 21 people have died in floods that have also caused heavy losses of livestock.
Gori said tea farms have so far been largely unaffected, and actually benefited from the downpours, as the bushes are grown in the highlands. "Basically, the impact in terms of flooding is not much, it has been fairly okay." In the past, lorries ferrying green leaf to factories regularly got stuck in the mud tracks in rural regions when rains fell but Gori said roads had been improved greatly in the past few years.
Only one case of a truck being unable to reach its destination due to the poor state of roads had been reported so far. "Infrastructure is getting better in this country. Cess (a tax tea farmers contribute for road construction) and local community funds are being used to improve roads," Gori said.
The rains are bringing relief to buyers who had to pay record prices for most of 2009 as the drought choked supplies to auction in Mombasa. Auction prices have fallen as buyers await a large volumes of tea to reach the market in coming weeks after the good harvests. Prices are still at premium levels. Top Broken Pekoe Ones fell to an average of $4.73 per kg last week from a record of $5.45 per kg in mid-December.