African Entrepreneurship Records

 Chapter 656 Expansion and Upgrading

Therefore, Ernst said: "Tea is one of the three major beverages in the world, and two of the three major beverages are dominant industries in East Africa, because tea and coffee cultivation have geographical restrictions, and the final alcoholic products are It is relatively rich, with various grains, fruits, and even other plants. In short, the raw materials for making wine are too abundant. It can be said that each region has its own wine."

 In fact, alcohol should be considered a dominant industry in East Africa, but this advantage is not too prominent. This is the result of comparison with coffee and tea.

 The current advantage of coffee in East Africa is unshakable, because as we all know, the quality of East African coffee is well-known around the world.

 This is not comparable to tea, because the types of tea are too rich, and the tea varieties introduced in East Africa are small varieties from the Far Eastern Empire, so they need special cultivation. There are hundreds of tea varieties introduced in East Africa from the Far Eastern Empire.

This involves East Africa's oversea tactics in the tea industry. An important reason why Indian tea has not been able to replace Far Eastern tea is that the taste is difficult to compare with Far Eastern tea.

 The solution to this problem in East Africa is to conduct experimental planting in large quantities, and then select the best of the best, choosing those with superior taste and yield for large-scale planting.

"The planting range of coffee is smaller than that of tea, basically in the tropics, while tea can also be widely distributed in the subtropics and even grow better. This is also an important reason why the Far Eastern Empire has become the largest tea country in the north. An important reason why the tea area can compete among the tea producing areas is the advantages of plateau terrain and tea production. The plateau ensures the quality of East African tea, and at the same time, the planting of tea gardens under the plateau terrain is also more convenient."

Of course, tea has relatively high requirements for terrain. Generally speaking, high-altitude terrain such as mountains and hills is the most suitable. For example, East Africa is a plateau area, while the Far Eastern Empire has complex and rich terrain. India's tea area Assam is a large area. plains, but the quality is much worse than that of the Far Eastern Empire and East Africa.

This is not an exaggeration from East Africa. In the previous life, Kenya had surpassed India and the Far Eastern Empire in tea exports for more than ten years. The important reason for Kenya's tea to catch up 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 a long-term advantage in the international market.

 In the previous life, the Far Eastern Empire and India had extremely rich domestic tea markets. India cultivated a large number of tea lovers during the colonial era. Of course, tea in India mainly appeared in the form of milk tea, and milk tea shops on the streets of India were very common.

Milk tea is also available in East Africa, mainly in northern pastures and some areas with relatively developed animal husbandry. The demand for milk tea is very high. The northern pastures are close to the northern tea areas and have high milk production. The combination of the two has caused the production of milk tea to rise. Of course, northern pastures are also important consumption areas for East African black tea.

 In the northern industrial belt, there is an abundant supply of dairy products, including milk tea and milked coffee, which are very popular. Therefore, the northern industrial belt is also the combination of the world's three largest beverage production and consumption areas.

"In addition to the northern tea area and the southern tea area, the Great Lakes area is also an excellent tea and coffee production area. However, it is currently not comparable in scale to the northern tea area and the southern tea area. This must be paid attention to, especially in the West Great Lakes area. Provinces (Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and other regions), the tea market is still very profitable, so providing more types of choices will also help open the market for East African tea."

The East African Plateau is regarded as a high-quality tea production area. This is a unique advantage of East Africa. Basically, all East African countries in the previous life produced tea. Even if they are not in the East African Plateau, the East African Plateau produces tea, which means that other plateau areas in East Africa are also suitable. After all, the overall environment for tea cultivation is similar.

"Of course, the biggest disadvantage of our East African tea industry is at the level of industrialized production, especially mechanization, which is far inferior to that of India, so we must work **** mechanized tea production. In addition to developing and importing tea production machinery from Austria, we also Relevant machinery manufacturing enterprises must be built.”

 East Africa is a semi-industrial country, but it is far inferior to European countries in the field of machinery manufacturing, and the field of mechanized tea production is even blank. Because most of East Africa's industrial and technological sources come from the German region, which does not produce tea, there is naturally no related mechanical production and technology accumulation.

The most advanced in this field is the United Kingdom. The British planted tea in India more than ten years earlier than in East Africa. Now there are large-scale machinery factories with hundreds of people in Indian tea factories.

 The world's largest tea producer and third largest industrial producer, the Far Eastern Empire and East Africa are still relying 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 tea production, but the effect is naturally hard to describe.

After all, this is an area that Austria has never touched before, so the efficiency of the machines used in tea production plants in East Africa is very unsatisfactory and cannot even replace labor. It also has a high failure rate and high maintenance costs.

So Ernst continued: "Our tea production capacity is still too weak. Corresponding improvements must be made to address the unreliability of machine production. The method of entrusting foreign design and production in previous years seems to be feasible now. It doesn’t make sense, so we still need to hire a professional team from Europe and let them customize relevant machinery for East African tea production based on East Africa’s traditional tea production processes.”

In addition, the advantage 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 benefits to East Africa every year, so the money spent on technology is acceptable to the East African government.

 As for tea revenue, the East African government is much stronger than the Far Eastern Empire government and India. The Far Eastern Empire government is relatively chaotic in terms of tea taxation, and it can even be said that it has done 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 the United Kingdom. With this alone, the Far Eastern Empire could surpass the British (exports of goods in foreign trade). The total value exceeds the total value of imported goods).

Nowadays, the Far Eastern Empire's annual tea export volume has reached around 100,000 tons, and the export volume is increasing almost every year. However, the tea tax of the Far Eastern Empire government is not long, and has been maintained at a level of several hundred thousand taels per year. This level is too low. , which is far from matching its status as the largest tea producer and consumer country. If the tea tax can be clarified, it can greatly solve the financial problems of its government, but this is obviously difficult to achieve.

As for India, it is purely a colony. No matter how much tea is planted, the British are the ones who benefit, and their contribution to India is not significant.

Although the scale of the tea industry in East Africa is much smaller than that of the Far Eastern Empire and India, the benefits derived from it belong to East Africa itself, and both the government and tea workers can benefit, so the government attaches great importance to tea income.

Therefore, the government is quite willing to promote the scale of tea planting, expand the East African tea market, and improve tea production efficiency.

 (End of this chapter)