Kenneth Rimdahl – TRANSCRIPT
Well, this is fermented tea leaves that people in Northern Thailand use for eating. Yes, this is the same leaf, and it’s from the same plant as the tea we normally use for drinking.
This, you know what it is, no? The drinking tea, I guess. So, please remember this because this is an ancient heritage from Northern Thailand that can provide to save the forest here in this region. I’ve been working with tea since 1994, when a good friend of mine, and my tea mentor, convinced me to open up a tea shop in Madrid, in Spain. And about 15 years ago, I came to Thailand to source ceramic teapots. At that time, I didn’t have a clue that Thailand was growing tea.
Not until a friend of mine – who today is also my business partner, Mr Vorakan Wongfu – he told me so. But I was not sure, because I’d never heard about tea from Thailand. I’d heard about tea from India, from Sri Lanka, from China, even from Russia, but never about tea from Thailand. So he wanted to show me, so he took me to the local market here in Chiang Mai, Worarot Market, and he shows me this.
Doesn’t look like tea, does it? So, still I was not very sure. So he told me, “Okay, I’ll take you up to the mountain; I’ll show you the plant.” So he took me up to the mountain, and it was the tea plant, but this was growing in the forest. I was amazed because it was so different from all the other tea plantations I’ve seen around the world. You know, these kind of small, green, beautiful bushes, grows nice fields.
But this tea was growing in its natural habitat, together with all the other trees.
Well, we continue our journey in Northern Thailand, traveling around, and I saw these kind of bare mountains without so many trees, some completely without any trees. And I started thinking about this deforestation and also about this tea that my friend just had shown me inside the forest. So, I thought, this was my profession, so I thought, wow, it’d be cool to make tea for drinking from this tea plantation and forest. But I went back to Spain, and it took many years.
And about five years ago, I met a very important tea professional here in Chiang Mai, and she introduced me to other tea professionals and tea farmers. And they said, “Yeah, it’s okay, you can do that. We do it already.” So then I got the idea of being able to produce tea only from Thailand, but forest-friendly.
So, why is the deforestation so bad? This is an example from Nan Province here in Thailand. Probably people who live in Thailand probably have read about it or seen it on television – this problem in Nan here. Luckily, this is not how most of the mountains look up here in Northern Thailand. But if we don’t take care, maybe this is how they will look in the future, and this is not the future we want, is it? We all have seen this in our school books. I think everybody saw it in their school books – we learned this.
But did we learn from it? Even if you live in a condo in the center of Bangkok, you need the forest because the forest, it provides the oxygen for you to breathe, it cleans the air of all the pollution that we are throwing out, it gives us biodiversity, and it gives us the rain and keeps the water that we need to survive.
So, what can tea do to save forests, or to help the forest? No, I’m not coming to that yet. First, I have to tell you a little bit about the deforestation. The deforestation is not new; it’s been going on for a long time. In colonial times, the Europeans came here and took a lot of teak woods from these forests. And they came here to get teak wood for building ships, or make furniture for their homes and so on.
The Thai government had tried to do many things to stop this, but still, illegal logging is going on. On top of that, in the 50s and 60s, due to instability and wars in neighboring countries, there was a massive immigration coming here. The population tripled within 50 years. So this, of course, caused a lot of cutting trees and building houses. And they also need food, so a lot more agriculture.
These mountains are also – They also started industrial farming in these mountains, for crops such as rubber, corn and fruit production. All this has put the forest in Northern Thailand in a little bit of danger.
So now I come to what tea can do to save this forest. But first, to answer that question, I have to first show you a little bit about the history of the tea plant. Today, as I’ve said before, the tea grows in these beautiful tea plantations. They are very efficient; you can pick a lot of tea very quickly, and at some plantations, you can also pick with machine. And also produce fantastic tea. These efficient plantations are very important because tea is the second most-consumed drink in the world, after water. So we have to pick a lot of tea to give everybody their teacup.
And now, take a look at this: this is also tea, but in its original form. This is wild tea. This has been growing for thousands of years in the mountains, in Thailand as well. And before the Chinese, who had this brilliant idea to invent the tea as we know it today – the tea for drinking – the tea was growing wild like this, in the forest, in only one area in the world. In the mountain chain between Assam, in India, into Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Yunnan, in China.
And before the Chinese invented the tea for drinking, people in this area were using the tea for other purposes; they were using it for herbal medicine, and also for producing tea – fermenting the tea for eating. And this, in Thailand, is called “miang.” This is still also popular in Burma and is called “lahpet thoke.” And probably, this was used in all this region where tea was growing wild before, but today, forgotten in most of the places.
So, let’s go back to Thailand. In Thailand, people like to eat the tea; they didn’t drink much tea, they like to eat it – ferment it and eat it. So they took the seeds from the wild tea that would grow in this mountain up here in Northern Thailand, and they started to plant it, also in the forest, like this. So this is a miang plantation, and this grows like – as you can see, together with other trees and other things. But the miang consumption had dropped dramatically.
Today, I don’t think that anyone under 60 years old eats miang anymore. So the miang business is not very good; they don’t make much money. And this put this miang plantation in danger, to be cut down and replaced with higher-value crops. But what if we take this leaf, and we start to produce the tea for drinking?
Now the focus has changed, and we are talking about producing tea, producing the second most-consumed beverage in the world. So, this is quite different. This tea plant, the tea plant from the miang plantation, they are strong and resistant. We don’t need pesticides; we don’t need irrigation systems.
And we want to preserve this tea plants because they are so strong and they take their nutrition from the ecosystem; they’re very good and strong. So by producing tea, we can put a value on this for the farmers. So, now I’m going to come back to this: “How can we save the forest with this tea?”
We turned this miang forest into high-quality, ecological-friendly tea. In this way, we can pay a higher price to the farmers, so they get a value for this tea plant in the forest, to grow it in the forest. In this way, they don’t want to cut down the trees, because if they cut down the trees around it, we don’t buy it anymore.
So to achieve this, we and the farmers and a local tea professional, we are working together, sharing skills and knowledge and experience to try to make this tea to be a high-quality product that we believe the whole world demands. And this is the way that we can protect the forest. So, this is another picture.
Here we can see a mountain, Doi Wawee Mountain in Chiang Rai, and a healthy mountain on the other side. Normally, when tea producers want to make tea from this miang plant – for the tea they found in the forest – they cut down the forest all around the tea trees, all the unnecessary trees.
So you can see here all these dots in that mountain – that is the tea plant. But you see that all the rest of the forest is cut down. And this has happened in Doi Wawee. But we have convinced this tea producer, in this mountain here, to replant this forest, to reforest this mountain. So far they have planted 1,000 trees of 50 different varieties, in this area here.
So in the future, we will once again get forest in its natural habitat. And this is a way that we also can use the tea, or the income from forest-friendly tea, to not only protect forest, but also actually reforest and reforest damaged area like this.
So, to conclude this – this presentation, having introduced a way of turning a local product that not so many people use anymore into something different that the world demands. Tea is the second-most drink in the world. And many tea professionals, farmers and community members have been part of developing this Monsoon Tea business model that can provide income to the farmers by keeping the forest.
This concept is not perfect yet, but we work with biologists, forest specialists, tea professionals to increase quality and also finetune this thing of both tea production and keeping the natural ecosystem. So we are constantly trying to get better in quality of tea; we’re trying to get better in logistics; we’re trying to get better, maybe, in how nature can work better together with tea. But all the time trying to keep a very good taste and a very high quality of tea.
So, ladies and gentlemen, this is our vision of a sustainable forest in Northern Thailand and our common future. And I encourage everyone to use their creativity to create a business in such a way that we can get the value to the forest that it’s worth. If we can start to make good products from the mountains where the forest still grows, we can help the farmers to get an income to keep the forest So, thank you very much. (Thai) Thank you.
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