Burundi Q1 tea revenues up 20% after good harvest

Monday, 30 April 2012 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Reuters: Burundi’s tea export revenues rose 20 percent in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period in 2011, boosted by high volumes of sales, a tea board official said on Thursday.

Tea is the second largest foreign exchange earner after coffee in he tiny central African country which exports 80 percent of the commodity through a regional weekly auction held in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa.

The state-run tea board (OTB) earned $6.92 million from the export of 2,485,768 kg. It collected $5.76 million between January and March last year from the sale of 1,909,170 kg.

“A lot of tea was exported over the last three months of this year due to a better harvest of tea leaves”, said OTB’s export official Joseph Marc Ndahigeze.

“This high output depended much on good rains observed in most tea growing areas,” he told Reuters.

Tea employs some 300,000 smallholder farmers in a nation of 8 million people.

OTB forecasts 2012 production at 7,750 tonnes, down from 8,816 tonnes in the previous year following uncertain weather conditions.