Chapter 656 Expansion and Upgrade
Therefore, Ernst said: "Tea is one of the three major beverages in the world, and among the three major beverages, two are advantageous industries in East Africa, because tea and coffee planting are both geographically restricted. The last alcoholic product is relatively rich, with various grains, fruits, and even other plants. In short, the raw materials for brewing are too rich. It can be said that each region has its own wine."
In fact, alcohol should be considered an advantageous industry in East Africa, but this advantage is not too prominent, compared with coffee and tea.
The current advantage of coffee in East Africa is unshakable, because it is well known that the quality of East African coffee is well-known all over the world.
Tea, on the contrary, cannot compare with it in this respect, because the varieties of tea are too rich, and the tea varieties introduced to East Africa are small types of the Far East Empire, so they need special cultivation. The number of tea varieties introduced to East Africa from the Far East Empire has reached hundreds.
This involves East Africa's strategy of using a large number of questions in the tea industry. An important reason why Indian tea has not been able to replace Far Eastern tea so far is that its taste is difficult to compare with Far Eastern tea.
East Africa’s solution to this problem is to carry out large-scale experimental planting, and then select the best ones with excellent taste and yield for large-scale planting.
"The planting area of coffee is smaller than that of tea, and it is basically in the tropical area, while tea can also be widely distributed in the subtropical area and even grow better. This is also an important reason why the Far East Empire became the number one tea producing country. An important reason why our northern tea area can stand out among the tea producing areas is the plateau terrain and tea production advantages. The plateau guarantees the quality of East African tea, and it is also more convenient to plant tea gardens under the plateau terrain."
Of course, tea has relatively high requirements for terrain. Generally speaking, high-altitude terrains such as mountains and hills are most suitable. East Africa is a plateau area, while the Far East Empire has complex and rich terrains. Assam, India's tea-growing area, is a large plain, but the quality is much worse than that of the Far East Empire and East Africa.
This is not an exaggeration in East Africa. In the past, Kenya surpassed India and the Far East Empire in tea exports for more than ten years. The important reason why Kenyan tea came from behind is naturally its excellent quality and huge output.
Of course, this is also related to the fact that Kenyans are not used to drinking tea. Most of their tea is exported, so they have long had an advantage in the international market.
In the past, the Far East Empire and India had extremely rich domestic tea markets. India cultivated a large number of tea lovers during the colonial era. Of course, Indian tea mainly appeared in the form of milk tea, and street milk tea shops in India were very common.
There is also milk tea in East Africa, mainly in the northern ranches and some areas with relatively developed animal husbandry. The demand for milk tea is very high. The northern ranches are close to the northern tea-growing areas and the milk production is high. The combination of the two has led to an increase in milk tea production. Of course, the northern ranches are also an important consumption area for East African black tea.
In the northern industrial belt, there is an adequate supply of dairy products, including milk tea and milk coffee, which are very popular, so the northern industrial belt is also a combination of the world's three major beverage production and consumption areas.
"In addition to the northern and southern tea regions, the Great Lakes region is also a high-quality tea and coffee producing region. However, the current scale cannot be compared with the northern and southern tea regions. This point must be taken seriously, especially in the Western Great Lakes Province (Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and other regions). The current tea market profit is still considerable, so providing more variety choices will also help open up the East African tea market."
The entire East African Plateau is considered a high-quality tea producing area, which is a unique advantage of East Africa. Basically, all East African countries in the past produced tea, even if they were not on the East African Plateau. The fact that the East African Plateau produces tea also means that other plateau areas in East Africa are also suitable for tea cultivation. After all, the overall environment is similar.
"Of course, the biggest disadvantage of our East African tea industry is still in the industrial production level, especially mechanization, which is far behind India. Therefore, we must work hard on mechanized tea production. In addition to developing and importing tea production machinery from Austria, we also need to build related machinery production enterprises ourselves."
East Africa is a semi-industrial country, but it is far behind European countries in the field of machinery manufacturing, and the field of mechanized tea production is even blank.
Because most of East Africa's industry and technology come from the German region, and the German region does not produce tea, there is naturally no relevant machinery production and technological accumulation.
The most advanced country in this field is Britain. Britain started growing tea in India more than ten years earlier than East Africa. Now, there are large-scale mechanized factories with hundreds of employees in Indian tea factories.
The world's largest tea producer and third largest industrial producer, the Far East Empire and East Africa, still rely on traditional methods to produce tea.
The situation in East Africa is slightly better. A factory in Austria was specially commissioned to design machines for producing tea, but the results are naturally hard to describe.
After all, this is a field that Austria has never touched upon, so the efficiency of the machines used in tea production factories in East Africa is far from satisfactory, and they cannot even replace manual labor. They also have a high failure rate and high maintenance costs.
Ernst continued, "Our tea production capacity is still too weak. We must make corresponding improvements to address the unreliability of machine production. The previous method of entrusting foreign design and production is no longer feasible. Therefore, we still need to hire a professional team from Europe to tailor relevant machinery for East African tea production based on East Africa's traditional tea production process."
In addition, the benefit of this is that various problems that occur after the machine is running can be solved at any time and targeted improvements can be made.
The disadvantage of this is self-evident, that is, the cost is relatively high, but the East African tea industry can bring considerable profits to East Africa every year, so the money spent on technology is acceptable to the East African government.
Regarding tea revenue, the East African government is much stronger than the Far Eastern Empire government and India. The Far Eastern Empire government is rather chaotic in tea taxation, and it can even be said that it does nothing.
Because tea is one of the most important export products of the Far Eastern Empire, before the Opium War, tea alone was an important export product of the Far Eastern Empire to Britain. The Far Eastern Empire was able to achieve a trade surplus with Britain with this item (the total value of exported goods in foreign trade exceeded the total value of imported goods).
Today, the annual tea export volume of the Far Eastern Empire has reached about 100,000 tons, and the export volume has been increasing almost every year. However, the tea tax of the Far Eastern Empire government has not increased, and has been maintained at the level of several hundred thousand taels per year. This level is too low, and is far from matching its status as the largest tea producer and consumer. If the tea tax can be clarified, it will greatly solve the government's financial problems, but this is obviously difficult to do.
As for India, it is purely a colony. No matter how much tea is planted, the British will profit from it, and it does not contribute much to India.
Although the scale of East Africa's tea industry is much smaller than that of the Far East Empire and India, the profits it obtains belong to East Africa. Both the government and tea workers can profit, so the government attaches great importance to tea income.
Therefore, the government is quite willing to promote the scale of tea cultivation, expand the East African tea market and improve tea production efficiency.
(End of this chapter)
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