The Hindu Business Line : Global certification for tea factories gaining ground

THE tea factories in the country can no longer sustain in domestic and global business without obtaining quality, consistency and process certifications covered by the International Standard Organisation (ISO 9001: 2000), Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) and the well known ISI mark from the Bureau of Indian Standards.

Having doled out Rs 26 crore for six months as price subsidy to please the 60,000 agitating Nilgiris small tea growers two years ago and having spent a huge sum for running a quality upgradation programme (QUP), the Government is certain that yielding to pressures for subsidies and minimum price fixation would not help in the long run and more so, in the post WTO regime. It is now convinced that the only sustainable solution to the tea crisis is to prepare the industry as a whole, not just in the Nilgiris, face the quality standards and market competition in the new regime.

As part of this, there is a move to introduce BIS certification for the tea manufactured and sold in the country. In the post WTO regime, teas without ISO and HACCP certification would soon be out of the shelves in the developed and cash-rich countries. Since tea comes falls under food and beverages category, the European Union, CIS, the US and Japan have already started insisting on the HACCP certification from tea suppliers.

"Consumers who pay a good price for quality teas are keen to ensure that the teas they drink are free from contamination, manufactured under personally hygiene and environmental sanitation and are quite safe. When the importing nations follow HACCP, it is only fair that they expect the producing nations to stick to these norms," Ms Annelies Hofman, Marketing Manager of the Dutch-based CMP Trading Bv told Business Line in the Netherlands.

Since tea industry in the country is generally run on traditional and experience basis, the quality parameters insisted by the modern consumer outlook are absent. Barring the colour and taste of the liquor, which are used as quality parameters, not much importance is attached to the quality norms in manufacture or cultivation. The use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, insectides, weedicides, etc in the fields as also the absence of drains and sewages leave much cause for concern. In the factories also, the personal hygiene of the labour, dusts and sweeps on the floors, use of polluted footwears where the black teas are spread and material handling allow room for health complaints.

That is why HACCP gains relevance in the manufacture of tea. The parallel system in vogue in the country is ISO 15000:1998 for food hygiene. It has the provisions for developing the hard analysis and fixing the critical control points. The BIS is the Government agency in the country to develop the ISO 9000 family standards for HAACP, Quality Management Systems (QMS) and Environment Management Systems (EMS). These certifications gain international acceptance through the Raad Voor Accreditate (RAV) of the Netherlands. As for ISO, the thrust is on consistency. "When we went on a tour of five States in the North to market the south Indian teas, we discovered that the traders there are prepared to buy even medium quality provided there is consistency. It is the consistent produce that fetches the highest price, not just the high quality teas," explained Mr Vikram Kapur, Executive Director of Tea Board.

The major complaint of the factories had been the high cost for obtaining the certification. The charge for the consultants is high because of the prohibitively high fees levied by BIS in granting certificates to them after pursuing a crash course and writing relevant exams.

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