Owais Mughal
Answer is US $220 million worth of it. Yes, it is true. Pakistan imported this much worth of tea in fiscal year 2006.
While years ago tea drinking used to be a fashionable habit, it is now our national habit, addiction and part of our evolutionary culture. 
Part of our culture in a sense that guests are now offered tea as a minimum. Guests also expect a cup of tea as a minimum when they visit somebody. The cultural fusion of tea in our daily lives is so complete that I recently had to bear a beautiful wedding song sacrifced to our tea habit. The real song goes like this:
banno teray abba ki ooNchi haveli
banno meiN DhooNDta chala aaya
but during a song competition, groom’s side plagiarized the song to:
banno teray abba ka chai ka khokha
banno meiN khaulta chala aaya
If you go to any Pakistani commercial bazaar (market), you will notice that all shopkeepers drink tea en-masse atleast twice daily. There is a whole institution in place where cups full of tea are distributed in the whole market and then collected later on. 
Tea is even offered on credit. One can choose from a variety of payment plans like ‘pay as you go’, pay weekly or monthly. Tea is also offered to prospective ‘gaahak’ (buyer) by the shopkeeper to show how sincere he/she is in upcoming transaction.
The $220 million amount seemed astronomical to me and it shocked me for few seconds and that is what prompted me to write these lines. Good or bad I don’t know because I myself contribute roughly $100 a year to this fashion. What to hide from you, I am sipping on a cup of tea even while writing these very lines. But after reading this number, I feel as if there is a brewing storm in my tea cup.
Fountain of Youth?
But then all is not bad about tea. Tea contains antioxidants which are good for us. One of my good friends who recently did research on tea tells me that during digestion of food besides energy for our daily activities, high energy free oxygen radicals are also produced. These highly mobile particles hit DNA in the cells, thus causing severe damage to DNA. This in turn could lead to defects in DNA which is the primary cause of cancer. Antioxidants found in tea neutralize free Oxygen radicals thus minimizing damage to DNA and hence cancer.
A recent research published in a leading journal “Nature” shows that DNA damage can also lead to premature aging in humans, in addition to cancer. Therefore, each time when you sip from your cup of tea, think like you are sipping from fountain of youth.
There are reports that Government of Pakistan is now awakening to this massive demand of a massive population of 160 million Pakistanis. There are reports of a plan to grow tea locally in Pakistan on 4000 acres. This will be done in private sector. Semi Government sectors will also chip in by growing tea at 800 acres in NWFP, 200 acres in AJK and 50 acres in FATA. This will still be like putting ‘ooNT ke muNh meiN zeera’ (a single cumin seed in a camel’s mouth) but better than nothing.
There is another angle to this national addiction. It gives Pakistan a teeny-tiny leverage in World trade. I’ve read in news that when India and Pakistan were in serious trade negotiations in 2004, then of all the people, it made Government of Kenya very nervous. Kenya gets a big share of our US $220 million up-for-grabs money and they were probably wary of losing its share to India’s Assamese and Darjeeling produced black tea.
I personally like Darjeeling black tea over Kenyan brands but then who am I to decide about World trade. I’ll end the post with this plagiarized sher:
“chai” se gharz-e-nishaat hai kis rosiaah ko
ik gona-e-be-khudi mujhay har dum chahiyay
Pakistan’s National Tea Research Institute:
Pakistan has established a National Tea Research Institute in Mansehra which works under Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC). The institute has a tea garden spread on 33 acres. Mansehra was chosen for tea research because of its hilly location with lots of rainfall. The web page of this tea research institute is here.ÂÂÂ
References:
(1) Photos for this post have been taken from flickr.com. Clicking on the photos will take you to their source website.
(2) Source of some of the information for this post is from here.
Previos ATP post on ‘chai’ (tea): Chai Chahiyay
The famous opium wars started in China around the 1860s due to the Chinese addiction for opium. The reason was simple. The Chinese started consuming too much opium, which China had to import. China used silver to buy opium. With too much addiction of opium Chinese silver reserves started declining. As a result silver became quite rarer and more expensive than the Chinese currency, as a result the farmers’ buying power reduced considerably and they got dis-enchanted. That ultimatley resulted in the opium war.
Though consumption of tea, by above accounts, of 220 million dollars, is not too much to worry about yet it could go out of control.
Also another habit of Pakistanis in general, taking too much sugar, also caused General Ayub to go and created troubles for General Musharraf. We on average consume almost as much sugar as an average American, despite the difference in buying power. 25kg per capita per annum for us, 30-35 for the US.
When such a large nation as Pakistan, with 160 million souls, start consuming something out of the ordinary then it is bound to have effect on the international market. Thus Kenya’s concerns are quite justified.
But I find the idea of home-grown tea quite ludicrous. For years we have been trying to do things we are not naturally geared towards doing, like the industrialization. We should do what we can do best rather than what we “should”. If our soil doesn’t support the growth of tea then it would be very expensive to grow local tea and the land that is good for growing other cash crops, such as sugar cane, would be used to grow something that is natural to it. We would only be wasting our resources.
The best way is to keep importing tea while producing other things and selling them to get dollars to buy tea in the international market.
good article…I remember when Nawaz Sharif started his second term there was a PTV special asking Pakistanis to drink less tea…now that’s cruelty.
Although most people my age do not drink tea, I’m glad I’m as addicted and non-functional without tea as any warm-blooded Pakistani should be.
excuse me ppl every nation have a habit ours is to drink tea atleast better then drinking alcohol though thts beyond point the point is sum nations drink coffee we drink tea to keep us going:)
Its good to see a post about tea after the talk about our electronic media. I guess we all need a nice cup of tea, preferably from a desi dhaba/driver hotel on GT road, and think in which direction Pakistan is going? When will we wake up and revolt????
Good. I love tea. Coffee is cool but tea is hot!! Nothing like a cup of KaRaK Cha from the driver hotels along the G.T. Road. So when will this Pakistani Tea be available for tea junkies like me?
But it must be expensive still.Its a pity our ‘white beer’ aka Lassie didnt get this popular, although its less expensive and more apropriate for a hot country like Pakistan. Is it something to do with the absence of caffeine in lassie or its color which led to this discrimination?
Why dont we think of a cheaper alternative to tea for our people. Maybe caffeine coated popcorns. Sweet for hypertensive people and salty for diabetics? or maybe more traditional papadoms or paapaR, where you dont need teeth as well. But then you cant drink either of them!