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Re: shade-grown tea??



I am glad you brought up the issue since I am also a tea drinker. The tea
plantatins I have seen in India and Sri Lanka all tend to be in pretty
much full sun. They mostly have a few well spaced out trees with a very
thin canopy. This leads me to guess that tea probably needs more sun than
coffee. BUT this is only a conjecture. Could anyone on this list either
confirm or modify this.

But yes, I can say for sure that tea cultivation is a BIG problem for
songbirds. Tea is mostly grown on the lower slopes of the mountains and
this is the very altitude that has the highest avian diveristy in the
Asian mountains. Most of the tea in India, for example, is grown in the
Western Ghat Mountains which with thier unique dwarf forests (sholas) and
rain forest are one of the birding hotspots in the world (ie. areas with a
large number of endemic species. Tea cultivation has een responsible for
turning this habitat into monoculture deserts.

Shantanu Phukan

*****************************************************
SHANTANU PHUKAN
Lecturer in Urdu-Hindi & Indian Literature
University of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill
Curriculum in Asian Studies
Alumni Hall 413C
Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599

phukan@email.unc.edu
919-962-6825
*****************************************************

On Fri, 3 Jan 2003, Ward Linda wrote:

> Glad to see the support for shade-grown coffee...we
> buy ours at the Pea Island visitor center in the Outer
> Banks....
>
> Is there such a thing as shade-grown tea?? Just
> wondering...i drink a lot of tea...is this an issue
> for birds?
>
> thanks for any info
>
> =====
> --Linda Jeannette Ward
> --P.O. Box 231
> --Coinjock, N.C. 27923
> --U.S.A.
> --tankapoet@yahoo.com
>
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