At a Ministerial level meeting held in Colombo last Monday, a total of eight countries, seven of them major tea producers and one consumer, resolved to form an International Tea Producers’ Forum with headquarter to be located in the Sri Lankan capital. The participating countries were India, China, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malawi, Rwanda and Iran.

The founding members of the Forum have set for themselves several objectives namely, to promote interests of tea producing countries, deliberate and evolve collective solutions to common problems affecting producers, provide technical cooperation and share technology and expertise, stimulate demand for tea by promoting consumption of tea through facilitating generic promotional campaign and raising awareness with a view to popularising tea as the most preferred beverage, undertake market studies, surveys, research projects aimed at addressing specific issues concerning tea in general or any variety of tea and to undertake and facilitate programmes for providing training to members of their executives in various aspects of tea in different geographical regions.

The draft constitution of the Forum was discussed and the members decided to adopt it subject to ratification of it by their respective governments.

At the Colombo meeting, D. Purandeswari, Union Minister of State for Commerce, led the 15-member India delegation. M. Samarasinghe, Minister of Plantation Industries of Sri Lanka; Abdul Aziz of Ministry of Agriculture, Indonesia; Japhet M. Kareke Mbuiuki, Assistant Minister of Agriculture of Kenya; Atu Kalinga, Chairman of Tea Association of Malawi and Alex Kanyankole, Director-General, National Agricultural Export Development Board of Rwanda, among others, were present.

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