Change is brewing in Turkey’s ancient tea industry
little Turks agree on these days that even settling on the country’s national drink is hard. Secularists pick, a tipple best had with grilled fish and music. Religious conservatives, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, insist on a milky and non-alcoholic drink calledA good thing, then, that there is tea, around which all can unite. An average Turk gets through about 3.
At one of the company’s factories near Rize, a drab city bordered on one side by the sea and by mountains draped in green carpets of tea on the other, the manager, Koksal Kasapoglu, says the policy has already yielded results. Organic production at Caykur has shot up from under 100 acres a decade ago to about 10,000 today, about 5% of the total area under cultivation, he says.
Tea owes its popularity in Turkey largely to price. In the second half of the 19th century, when tea arrived in the Ottoman empire, the economy was in decline. Many Turks chose the new drink over coffee, which they had been sipping for centuries, but which had become hard to afford. Price is just as important today. Partly because organically grown tea requires more land to produce the same amount of crop, it costs roughly twice as much as the standard kind. Taxpayers’ cash can no doubt persuade many farmers to go organic. But with the economy sputtering, convincing Turkish tea-drinkers to buy the stuff will be harder."Tea for two times the price"
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