Tea traders call for zero tax on plant machinery

Tea Farm. The National Tea Stakeholders Conference held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi on Friday, October 30, 2015 said that farmers would earn better if the government zero-rated import duty on plant machinery thereby enhancing processing of teas in the country. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP 

In Summary

• The National Tea Stakeholders Conference held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi on Friday said that farmers would earn better if the government zero-rated import duty on plant machinery thereby enhancing processing of teas in the country.

By JAMES KARIUKI
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Tea traders are calling on the government to offer tax exemptions to capital machinery imports to enable companies eyeing value addition to set base in Kenya.

The National Tea Stakeholders Conference held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi on Friday said that farmers would earn better if the government zero-rated import duty on plant machinery thereby enhancing processing of teas in the country.

“Several private factories would jostle for Kenyan tea thereby helping farmers bargain for better prices for their crop. In Kenya, the processed tea sold in supermarkets should also be zero rated to give the declining tea drinking culture an upward swirl,” said East Africa Tea Trade Association (EATTA) boss Edward Mudibo.

Mr Mudibo said that they were holding talks with the government but noted that the formulation of policies that could revamp the tea industry were taking too long.

Tea Research Institute (TRI) director, Dr Samson Kamunya, called for investment in tea development, saying the government and the sector traders had turned a deaf ear to calls by the institute to modernise its study centres.

This, he said, had seen other countries establish modern laboratories while TRI continued using obsolete equipment that were installed by the colonial government in the 1940’s.
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“We sell CTC (crush, tear, curl) tea to six core markets but there is a major shift to other tea products and it is time we also followed suit since our tea is highly preferred as it is chemical-free,” said Mr Mudibo.

EATTA’s vice-chairman Tom Muchura said there was need for East African countries to jointly source for new markets within the continent and beyond while putting emphasis on value addition.

He said fluctuation of tea prices could best be addressed if a tea-drinking campaign was done locally with a focus on creating awareness on the health benefits of drinking pure tea without milk and sugar.