Falling Production & Growing Imports: Revitalizing the Indonesian Tea Sector

At the annual Indonesian Tea Board and National Tea Dialogue 2013 gathering (26/11), Rachmat Badruddin, Chairman of the Indonesian Tea Board, said that despite the budget for national tea development having risen from IDR 5 billion (USD $427 thousand) to IDR 48 billion (USD $4.1 million), it will take hard and efficient work in order to increase Indonesia's quality and quantity of tea. In particular, a large responsibility lies with the Indonesian tea farmers to increase production rates using the available funds. Badruddin expressed that it is important to develop integration from the upstream to downstream tea sector.

Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Rusman Heriawan, added that intersectoral collaboration is necessary for the development of the national tea industry. According to him, the Ministry of Industry also has an important role to play for removing obstacles in the tea processing industry.

	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
Indonesian Tea Production (in metric tonnes)	150,623	153,971	156,904	150,342	142,400

^{Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations}

With Indonesian tea production rates in decline and Indonesian tea consumption growing (over 20 percent annually), Southeast Asia's largest economy is in need of increasingly more tea imports to meet domestic demand. Currently, about 25 percent of the country's tea consumption is imported but this is expected to grow if the nation's tea output cannot be not raised.

Further Reading:

• Tea in Indonesia
• Commodities of Indonesia


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