Islamabad: National Tea and High Value Crops Research Institute (NTHVCRI) Director, Dr Farrukh Siyar Hamid on Friday disclosed that Turkey’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock had gifted Pakistan an automatic tea-processing plant.
He said the plant has arrived in Karachi and will be released once the paperwork pertaining to it gets concluded.
The plant will be installed at a tea project site in Shinkiari, near Mansehra and will be the country’s first tea garden that will be able to produce green and black tea.
The plant will commence operations by April 2018 and be able to produce 400-500kg of tea per day.
In soil surveys conducted by NTHVCRI, around 158,417-acre land has been earmarked for tea plantation purposes in the districts of Swat, Battagram and Mansehra.
Dr Hamid said that soil surveys conducted for tea cultivation in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) region had been positive but the forestry department there had refused to give any land for this project.
NTHVCRI has also successfully concluded testing of fourteen exotic tea germplasm, and also setup clusters at Kunhar, Konsh and Siran valleys where sixty farmers were imparted training on how to grow tea.
As per NTHVCRI data, the country imported 93,500 metric tons of black tea at a cost of Rs22b during Jan-June 2017. Green tea imports during Jan-June 2017 stood at 450m tons which cost Rs106m. Tea imports were revealed to have grown 325pc in last two decades.
