Here you’ve got everything! High elevation! Misty cool air! Wild trees and flowers! Top of the mountain far from pollution! EU, USDA, JAS Organic certified tea garden with hand pulled weeding! Beautiful young red-heart varietal Tieguanyin bushes! There’s more: Warbling birds! Wild boars! Huge snakes! Water jetting out between mountain rocks! Is that good enough for the Western Market? They asked. Nope, I said. Your prices need to be below $15 p/lb. Mr Lin : ‘but that’s how much we pay our tea pickers! We need to charge 5 times that amount!’ here’s how it works: For it to get to the West, first you have to sell it to Germany import monopoly. They will then export to the other countries like France, or the US. Then, your importer gets a cut, then your distributor, then your retailer, before it gets to you, the consumer. By then it’s 5-6 times its original cost. As a result, only low mountain, polluted flat areas with machine cut teas, can make it out West as ‘organic’. No problem, said Mr Lin. The highrollers in China now want good taste AND health, they can afford the good stuff, no need to export.
