Tea auction because of this year finally kicks off today
The weekly bidding of the brand new tea auction year will finally happen in Chattogram today, two months later than its scheduled start on March 24, much to the relief of tea estates and small farmers, who are sitting on about 2 million kilograms of unsold tea.
About 1.83 million kg of tea was stated in the first three months of the entire year, according to data from the Bangladesh Tea Board (BTB).
And there is about 0.9 million kg of leftover stock from the previous year, which remained unsold for the cancellation of the first two auctions for the new year scheduled for March 24 and March 31 respectively.
As a result of delayed start of the new auction year, the majority of the 167 tea estates and also 5,000 small farmers in Sylhet, Habiganj, Moulvibazar, Chattogram and Panchagarh are in acute financial crisis and so are struggling to pay the workers' wages.
A lot more than 3 lakh workers are engaged with the tea gardens.
But there now is apparently some movement.
Today's auction though would not be held at the usual venue in Agrabad but in the local conference hall of the Chittagong Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCCI) at the World Trade Centre to maintain proper social distancing among the bidders as instructed by the tea board in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.
Tea traders and officials of different brokerage houses, however, expect weak sales as tea consumption dropped remarkably considering that the tea stalls, restaurants and hotels are closed for the countrywide shutdown in the last one-and-a-half months.
Plus, many buyers from Dhaka and elsewhere wouldn't normally manage to attend.
"The majority sales would so poor," said Shah Moinuddin Hasan, chairman of the Tea Traders Association of Bangladesh.
