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Largest tea yield expected this yr

Iqbal Siddiquee, Syihet
With favourable weather conditions, tea planters are expectinga better yield thisyear, which may exceed last year's 63.85 million kilogrammes, the highest ever production in Bangladesh.
Tea output is already up by more than four lakh kg in March-July this year compared to the same period last year, when the production stood at around 23.6 million kg, said Director of the project development unit of Bangladesh Tea Board (bi b) Harun-ur-Rashid.
Tea is a sensitive crop requiring consistent rainfall and sunshine, especially between March and October, the main harvesting period, he told The Daily Star recently.
General Manager of Khadim Tea Estate in
Syihet Numan Haider Chowdhury said weather had been very good so far. "If it persists till October, we will get a larger yield thisyear."
In the March-July period, 20 gardens in northern Syihet produced 18.52 lakh kg of tea, 9.25 percent up from last year's, said Chowdhury, also chairman of the north Syihet circle of Bangladesh Tea Association, an organisation of tea estate owners.
Around 160 major tea plantations in Bangladesh, 140 of them in Syihet and the rest in Chittagong, produce an average of 60 million kg of tea annually. Apart from these, some small tea holdings are located in Dinajpur and Panchagarh.
Although the start of the cropping season in March seemed not very well, it is far better
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now, said BTB General Manager Mohammad Shahjahan. "The pest infestation is negligible too. So, we are hoping a better harvest this year, perhaps the highest ever,” he added.
Meanwhile, the export of tea, a major cash crop of Bangladesh, has declined over the time with an exponential increase in the domestic consumption.
A decade ago, the country used to export one third of the total tea produce, but it has come down to about five percent on an average today, said Shahjahan. The BTB official estimated that the
export was far unlikely to go past five percent this year.
He ascribed the export fall to the faster growth of demand. When the domestic consumption is growing at about four percent annually, the output growth is belowl .5 percent, he said.
The official said if the production continued at the current rate, export might stop in a couple of years, which would affect the country's economy.
Last year, Bangladesh exported 1.5 million kg of tea, about four percent of the output, racking in Tk 22.23 crore. In 2007, the export stood at about 10 million kg.