Green tea from Jebus district in West Bangka regency, Bangka Belitung province has decended into a state of anonymous peril.

The tea is not even recorded at the Indonesian Tea Board because '€œlocal authorities haven'€™t informed us about it yet'€, said Rahdi, an expert who works at the Indonesian Tea Board.

Those in the know are mostly Bangka Chinese who drink the tea for its purported health benefits.

'€œMy father-in-law has to drink the tea whenever he eats beef or seafood; otherwise he gets a headache,'€ said Lim Chun Fui, a Jebus resident. He swears by the tea'€™s ability to lower cholesterol.

Non-Chinese like Saukani '€” head of the Plantation Crops division of the West Bangka regency'€™s Agriculture, Plantation and Animal Husbandry '€” also consider the tea as medicine, '€œsold in some Chinese drugstores'€, implying that its taste is not a priority.

Data provided by the regency'€™s head of processing and marketing of plantation crops division, Bustanil Arifin, recorded that two associations of tea growers, Tayu Mandiri (formerly Ketayu I) and Ketayu II, produced 301 kg and 44 kg of tea last year, respectively.

Comprising a total recorded area of 10.17 hectares, the two estates, and those of the newly established Jerangkat Jaya association, are family owned and run smallholdings where the owner often runs the estate themselves, making tea as a side job rather than it being their primary source of income because earnings from selling tea alone are not enough to make ends meet.

So, when opportunity for bigger profit knocked, even the original tea plants grown from seeds brought by Bong Kim Tet six generations ago were removed to make way for a household-scale tin mine called te'€™i in 2000, according to Tayu hamlet chief Lie Po On and A. Tjoe, whose husband is Bong'€™s descendant.

However, no one else has thus far followed suit because their estates are not economically mineable and will become agriculturally unfit when converted to te'€™i.

'€œTea plants cannot grow on tin tailings. The other crops [white pepper, rubber and oil palm] grow poorly on them,'€ Lie said, adding that most of the estates lie deep in the hinterland, accessible only by motorcycle, thus relatively free from pollution.

Green tea: Freshly picked tea leaves are placed in a bamboo basket.

 

 

Work in progress: Freshly picked tea leaves being roasted in a wok heated by a wood fire in Tayu Hamlet.

'€œThe mining operations, still ongoing in the greater region, won'€™t pollute them either,'€ said geologist Satrio Agung Nugroho of tin mining and smelting company PT Mitra Stania Prima.

'€œThe tin ore occurs in secondary deposits. Weathering and erosion ensure the minerals get peeled off without chemical intervention, and smelting is concentrated in Jelitik [in Sungai Liat, 110,9 km east of Jebus],'€ he explained.

Despite there being no qualms about contamination, the tea '€œis difficult to sell'€, said Lie who is a tea grower himself. He said he has 40 kg of tea still unsold at his home, '€œdue to lack of proper packaging'€.

Local authorities have provided him and other Tayu Mandiri growers with a roasting machine, which they have stopped using because the resultant tea has a different smell and whitish color. They were also given a packaging machine, which Lie is not happy with. He would prefer to turn the tea leaves into granular tea particles to enable him sell the tea in tea bags and the machinery is not able to do this.

Lie is also appaled by merchants from Pangkal Pinang, the capital city of Bangka-Belitung province, who purchased his tea and sold it as Tayu tea after mixing it with cheaper Javanese teas, thus giving the tea a bad name.

Tea offering: Tayu tea served to guests during a meeting with Ketap village chief Rusma and other village officials.

But his worst fear is the likely conversion of the state-owned production forests, on which most Tayu tea plants grow, into industrial plantation forests, as is was intended by an ex-district chief in 2009. The same ex-district chief recently won the local election again.

'€œIndustrial concession designation would make the land inaccessible; we would no longer be able to grow tea crops or collect firewood to roast the tea,'€ he said, adding that 1000 signatures to reject such conversion have been forwarded to the governor.

This fear is, however, dismissed by Azmal Az, the head of the district'€™s plantation service, as mere tempest in a teacup.

'€œThere are areas already designated as industrial plantation forests but until now, nothing has changed here. This is politics being played in high places,'€ he said, believing that '€œchanging the land'€™s designation won'€™t be easy, as long as people staunchly resist it'€.

'€” Photos by Arif Suryobuwono