The members of All Assam Small Tea Growers’ Association(AASTGA) on Monday staged a protest outside DC office in Dibrugarh decrying the dramatic collapse in green tea leaf prices.
Prices have plunged from a peak of Rs 52 per kg to as low as 15- will below the production cost of Rs 25-27 per kg.
“Our demand to government to establish a minimum sustainable price (MSP) for green leaf but they are not taking it seriously. We are facing complete ruin. When it cost us Rs 25 to Rs 27 to produce one kg of quality green tea leaves, how can we survive selling at Rs 15? We are operating at massive losses every day,” said Rubul Hatibaruah, president of AASTGA.
He said, “We are peaceful farmers and doing green revolution to strengthen our economy but is seems that now our future is in dark due to drastic fall of the prices of green leaf,”.
“The tea leafs are coming from Kenya. Why blending is necessary in Assam tea. The government should take immediate step to control the prices of green leaf,” Hatibaruah said.
This unsustainable pricing has left thousands of growers, many of them educated youth who invested their savings into tea cultivation, unable to meet basic operational expenses such as wages, fertilisers, and pesticides.
Small tea growers — defined by the Tea Board as those cultivating up to 25 acres, though most own less than two — are a backbone of Assam’s tea industry. With 125,484 growers managing 117,304 hectares of land, they contribute nearly 48% of the state’s total tea production annually.
