LETTERS: Key success lessons from the tea industry

The tea industry remains the only traditional, (pre-independence if you like), cash crop business where sanity still reigns more than 50 years after indigenous farmers started to grow it commercially. Many other cash crops, namely, coffee, pyrethrum, cotton, sugarcane, among others, either collapsed or are on the edge of a precipice.

The consequences have been devastating - farmers rendered destitute, increased joblessness, loss of foreign exchange earnings, spiralling crime rates and destabilised rural economies. That the tea industry has remained relevant while operating in the same space where others failed is not by some stroke of good luck. Neither is it due to positive discrimination or favouritism by the government.