Pakistan's tea drinking is a crisis that seems likely to persist

In 1976, The Times of India (ToI) reported on how a cup of tea became caught up in the Bangladesh war. Lt-Colonel HS Dayal of the 15 Mahar Battalion, recounted how, on December 16, 1971, he kept calling over a loudspeaker for the garrison at Chittagong to surrender. He stopped to sip tea and “those five minutes were enough for the Pakistani troops to change their minds and open fire in a last-ditch but futile battle”. They soon surrendered, as did the rest of Pakistan’s army that day.

At independence, Pakistan could argue that the Partition gave it an advantage by allocating it substantial production areas for jute, wheat, cotton and tea. This could explain why the state emblem of Pakistan features all four crops. India had the processing and trading centres, but was cut off from the raw material.

Pakistan hoped its surplus production could give it an advantage in export markets. But it found its internal demand for tea racing ahead. “Strangely enough, the people of Pakistan are becoming more and more tea-minded,” wrote Manzoorul Haque in a long ToI article on Pakistan’s exports in October 1953. Tea exports fell so fast that in April 1959, ToI reported that Pakistan’s commerce minister ZA Bhutto announced a drastic raise of excise on tea to cut domestic demand and preserve exports.

By 1960, exports were halted altogether. ToI reported Pakistan’s food and agriculture minister Lt General KN Sheikh citing drought in East Pakistan for this, but a more fundamental reason seems to have been the unstoppable rise of tea drinking. That same year, Pakistan launched a “drink less tea” campaign that evidently had no impact .

According to Statista, a German data collection company, Pakistanis are now the fifth largest consumers of tea, drinking 1.5 kg per capita annually. India comes far below, ranking 29th, with just 0.33 kg of tea per person each year.

This is why the loss of East Pakistan’s tea gardens was a real crisis. In 1971, James Sterba wrote in The New York Times that Bhutto, now president, told his people “the tea party is over”. Servicing their tea addiction now required imports, draining precious foreign exchange. But, as Sterba noted, “Bhutto’s chances of staying in office if he banned tea would be as unsure as president Nixon’s re-election after he banned football.”

Pakistan is now the world largest tea importer, paying huge amounts to Vietnam, Kenya and Sri Lanka. “I appeal to the nation to cut down consumption of tea by one to two cups because we import tea on loan,” said Ahsan Iqbal, a senior Pakistani minister, in 2022, with an air of futility.

Importing from India would make geographic sense and attempts have been made. In 1960, ToI reported that “India is understood to have offered to sell to Pakistan five million pounds of tea to tide over the recent scarcity”. In 1976, India’s then commerce minister, DP Chattopadhyaya, told the Lok Sabha that “a representative of the Tea Trading Corporation had visited Pakistan as a member of the trade dele gation and Pakistani importers had evinced interest in the matter”. But in the end, political realities mean that this is unlikely to happen.

The real mystery is over why Pakistan’s tea consumption soared so high. In The True History of Tea , Victor H Mair and Erling Hoh note that the Islamic world has shifted hugely from coffee to tea. In less than a century, Turkey went from almost no tea consumption to being the world’s top consumer, at a staggering 3.16 kg per capita. It helps that most of this is produced domestically, with the Black Sea coast offering the right combination of cool temperature and high rainfall for tea.

But Pakistan lacks this, so despite attempts being made to plant tea, this post-Partition problem seems likely to persist.