Georgia Was the World's Fourth-Largest Tea Exporter. Then It Lost 99 Percent of the Crop.

Georgia sold the Soviet Union almost all of its tea. At the peak, in 1985, the republic pressed out 152,000 metric tons of it, worked nearly 60,000 hectares of hillside, and ranked among the top four or five tea exporters on earth by weight. By 2014 the annual harvest had fallen to about 1,800 tons. That is a decline of close to 99 percent, and it happened inside a single working lifetime. The country that had been one of the world's great tea exporters was, within two decades, importing most of what it drank.

An industry does not lose ninety-nine parts in a hundred because of weather or a bad season. It loses that much when the buyer disappears and the product cannot survive being sold to anyone else. Georgian tea had exactly one customer, and when that customer dissolved in 1991, the figures underneath the industry turned out to have been holding up nothing at all.

A Cantonese specialist and a gold medal

The industry began, as most industries do, with someone who knew how the thing was actually made. In 1893 the Russian tea merchant Alexander Popov invited Liu Junzhou, a Cantonese tea specialist, to establish cultivation at Chakva, on the humid Black Sea coast north of Batumi in what is now Adjara. Liu arrived with 1,000 kilograms of tea seed and 150,000 saplings carried from China, planted roughly 80 acres, about 32 hectares, and built a factory to process the leaf. The first harvest came in 1896. Three years after landing, he was producing a genuinely good black tea.

The proof arrived quickly. In 1900 Chakva tea took a gold medal at the Paris World Exposition, its inscription reading, without much modesty, "Best Tea in the World." In 1926 the operation Liu had built was organized into a joint-stock company, "Sakartvelos Chai" (Georgian Tea), according to the Georgian business outlet Georgia and the World, bringing the farms and factories under one enterprise. Liu was decorated for his work by both the Russian Empire and, later, the USSR.

One detail of that founding fits the arithmetic of the whole story. Standard Soviet and Georgian histories have tended to credit Popov's money and quietly omit the Chinese specialist who actually grew the tea. The man who supplied the capital is remembered; the man who supplied the knowledge is not, a founding story as lopsided as the industry's later pricing.

The tonnage machine

What followed was expansion on a scale only a planned economy attempts. Land under tea grew from under 1,000 hectares in 1917 to roughly 100,000 hectares by 1980 at the broadest measure. At its fullest extent the industry fully or partly employed nearly 180,000 people. Georgia supplied about 95 percent of all the tea drunk across the Soviet Union, and until 1992 the other republics bought about 95 percent of what Georgia processed. It was, in effect, a closed circuit: one supplier, one market, and no price signal passing between them that either side could not ignore.

That structure was bound to hurt quality, and it did. Soviet management wanted tonnage, and it got tonnage by pouring on artificial fertilizer and running mechanized "hedge-trimmer" harvesters that stripped leaf by volume rather than by grade. The machines produced low-quality tea, and no one hid it; even the Soviet-era press called them "far from perfect." Quality dropped perceptibly through the 1970s and 1980s. Why would it not? A captive buyer does not punish a bad cup. The market that would have disciplined the leaf had been designed out of existence, and the leaf coarsened accordingly. The figures said the industry was enormous. They did not say it was any good.

When the buyer disappeared

In 1991 the Soviet Union broke apart and took the guaranteed market with it. Now Georgian tea had to be sold in the open, against cheap Asian production, and the quality that a captive customer had tolerated for two decades was suddenly a commercial liability. The tea could not compete, and the buyers who might have overlooked that were gone.

The timing could hardly have been worse. Georgia's 1991 to 1994 civil war and separatist conflicts tore through the sector directly. Factories and machinery were dismantled and sold off as scrap metal. Most of the cooperative farms involved in tea went bankrupt, and vast stretches of plantation were simply abandoned to the hillside. The decline to about 1,800 tons by 2014 was not a slump. It was a demolition, part economic and part literal, of an industry that had been built to feed a country that no longer existed.

One part of the loss will not be recovered on any terms. Some of the historic Soviet-era plantation area lies in Abkhazia, the breakaway region that has been outside Georgian government control since the war of the early 1990s. That acreage is inaccessible to Georgia's tea sector, and no revival program brings it back. When a country loses ninety-nine percent of a crop, it can plant again on the ninety-nine. It cannot plant on the ground it no longer holds.

A small, real revival

Since the 2014 low, the harvest has climbed back to about 3,000 tons a year. That is the honest headline, and the honest way to read it is that 3,000 tons is roughly 2 percent of the 1985 peak. The recovery is real. It is also, against what was lost, very small. Exports run around 2,000 tons a year and are described in trade coverage as "very cheap," which is the market's blunt way of saying bulk commodity leaf, not a branded premium product. Georgia is selling tea again. It is not yet selling tea for much.

A government "Georgian Tea" rehabilitation program set out to restore roughly 3,000 hectares over two years and, by the reporting, has brought more than 1,000 hectares of abandoned plantation back into use. Outside money has helped at the margins: the European Union's ENPARD program funded organic rehabilitation, including a five-year grant of 40,000 euros, about US$43,000, to the Nagomari plantation, with the farmer required to co-finance. A UNDP small-grants scheme in Guria, backed by Swiss and Austrian development agencies and Georgia's own regional-development ministry, financed 29 small enterprises.

The cooperative model, the structure that collapsed in the 1990s, remains the weak point. Of 40 tea-sector agricultural cooperatives, only 21 are operational, and those working co-ops control just 46 hectares between them, with members owning perhaps another 200 hectares personally. That is a rounding error against even the diminished modern acreage. The institutions meant to organize the revival are, for the most part, not yet organizing much.

The people planting again

What the co-op figures miss is who is actually doing the work, and they are worth naming. Mikheil Tsintsadze runs Georgian Flavour in Guria, a region whose tea history reaches back to the early 1800s. His company makes nine types of tea, one of them a black tea packed inside a whole dried lemon skin, employs 15 people directly, and buys fresh leaf from about 80 local growers. He used a UNDP grant to build an outdoor tasting space, so growers who sell him leaf are not the only ones who ever see the plant.

Miina Saak came further to do it. A former Estonian office worker, she co-founded Renegade Tea Estate with friends from Estonia and Lithuania who relocated to Georgia, in her phrase, "to work with our hands again." Saak is the one who reports the uptick to about 3,000 tons, and she is candid about where the appeal now lies. Georgia's cold winters kill off pests that plague warmer tea regions, which lets growers make a straightforward case for organic, pesticide-free tea without heavy spraying. Her markets are mostly Northern Europe and the United States.

The organic angle is the clearest strategy on offer, and others are pursuing it alongside domestic sales and exports back into the former Soviet space, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, with a longer hope of Asian markets and Chinese technical help. There is a modest tourism play too: a "Tea Route" trail through Guria's growing areas drew over 2,000 visitors in its first year before COVID-19 disrupted the revenue side. Companies keep appearing in the trade press, Geoplant, Althaus, Bio Universal Georgia, whose Manna Tea label reported about US$200,000 in US sales and 80,000 euros, roughly US$86,000, in Germany in 2015.

Set against those numbers is a projection worth keeping in its box. In older trade coverage, a Georgian deputy agriculture minister, Levan Davitashvili, suggested tea exports could reach US$20 million within three to four years of the restoration work. That was an official forecast, not a recorded result, and it should be read as one.

The most telling figure is the one that measures Georgia at home. According to AgroNews.ge, Georgian tea today holds about 20 percent of Georgia's own domestic tea market, and the country has roughly 2,000 hectares under cultivation, against the roughly 67,000 hectares the same outlet reports at the Soviet peak. Four cups in five that Georgians themselves drink are still imported, on land that grew a top-five export crop within living memory.