Aurelia Butler

Chinese tea buyers are disrupting a heated trade spat between Nepal and India that has brought counterfeit Darjeeling into the teapots of unsuspecting consumers.Indian tea estates have come under severe pressure due to an onslaught of cheaper Nepalese tea that traders have been happy to repackage as Darjeeling, the “champagne” of premium teas grown just over the Nepal-India border.India has historically accounted for nearly all of Nepal’s tea exports, meaning Darjeeling tea makers have found it hard to compete with the cheaper leaves flooding the market. Now, with China emerging as a bigger buyer of Kathmandu’s wares, industry insiders say the pressure on India should go down.Ever since the Tibetan border was reopened and tariff-free trade expanded in 2022, Nepalese tea trade with China has soared. According to data from the Nepalese ministry of commerce, the amount of tea sold in the fiscal year ending in 2023 more than doubled to 15.7 tonnes compared with 7.3 tonnes in 2019-2020, the year before China’s zero-Covid policy halted Nepal-China commerce. Traders say that sales are on track to go up again this year.“Nepal has a chance at a new lucrative market in China,” said Nishchal Banskota, founder and owner of the Nepal Tea Collective. “[The trade clashes] are an economic issue and this should provide some relief.”Nepal being able to trade more tea with China “is good for Nepal and means that Darjeeling may not be as threatened”, said Jeni Dodd, head of tea importing company Jeni Dodd Tea.The tea industries of Nepal and India have been intertwined for six decades. India is the largest producer of black tea in the world with an annual output of 1.3mn tonnes. It also receives most of Nepal’s output, with 90 per cent of Nepal’s tea exported to India in 2023, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the OECD.You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.“Nepalese tea leaves have traditionally been plucked in Nepal, and then processed in India, where there were already factories and machinery,” said Joydeep Phukan, secretary of the Tea Research Association, an Indian organisation that supports global tea production. But the economic landscape has shifted, as Chinese buyers have boosted Nepal’s burgeoning industry and costs for Darjeeling producers have rocketed. China’s black tea producers primarily serve its large domestic tea market, with only 7 per cent of its product exported, according to the UN FAO. But amid rising demand, traders have been looking for new sources of both green and black tea cultivated to Chinese standards, with many turning to Nepal. “China is playing a crucial role in providing tea machinery to the tea industry in Nepal. Along with the tea machinery, the tea manufacturers in Nepal are trained to make [Chinese-style] teas,” said Phukan.While costs have gone down for Nepalese farmers, they have increased for Indian estates. India’s stronger labour laws have required estate owners to pay workers fairer wages, and climate change has started to decrease overall tea yields at a faster clip than more mountainous Nepal. In 2023, Darjeeling’s shrinking tea estates produced 6,180 tonnes of Darjeeling tea, down 11 per cent from the previous year. Sparsh Agarwal of Selim Hill Tea Garden, a Darjeeling tea estate, estimates that the cost of production in Nepal is a third of the cost in India due to different labour requirements. “The Darjeeling tea producers are not able to compete with Nepal producers,” he said.Competition came to a head during the pandemic, when a worker strike in Darjeeling left a gap in the market and China’s closure of its border pushed Nepalese and Indian tea farmers into more fierce competition.Under pressure from large buyers to keep prices low and maintain supply, Indian tea sellers began blending cheaper Nepalese tea with Darjeeling, putting even more stress on Darjeeling’s moribund estates.“Conservatively, I would say 25 per cent of Darjeeling sold today is really mixed Nepal and Darjeeling leaves,” said Vivek Lochan, a seller of both Indian and Nepalese teas.The use of Nepal leaves motivated members of Indian parliament to call for an import ban on Nepalese tea in 2022. The Tea Board of India — the government body in charge of the tea industry — also briefly enacted a ban on blending teas in 2022, only to walk it back under pressure from large tea companies.Tea sellers say that increased appetite from China is set to lessen tensions between Darjeeling and Nepalese growers.In April 2023, the Chinese foreign ministry stated that “tea . . . [will be] an important bond connecting China [and Nepal],” after Kathmandu and Beijing expanded their free trade agreements. Trade is set to get a further lift with the opening of a new road connecting the tea growing regions in western Nepal with Tibet this year. “More and more Chinese buyers are coming each week. And they are helping us set up banking [in Renminbi], so we can trade more easily in the future,” said Tara Adhikari, a Nepalese tea seller.According to data from the Nepalese ministry of commerce, Chinese buyers are also paying more for Nepal’s leaves. In the year to date, Chinese buyers are paying on average 1,600 Nepalese rupees per kilogramme, as compared to 200 Nepalese rupees per kilogramme by Indian buyers.“Indian traders demand a much lower price for Nepal’s leaves. Chinese trades are offering more . . . this will decrease the sales of [counterfeit Darjeeling] to India,” said Gaurab Luitel of the National Tea and Coffee Development Board, Nepal’s government body responsible for the tea industry.Still, the amount of tea trade between China and Nepal, while growing, pales in comparison to India’s current near monopoly on Nepalese imports. And China’s support for Nepalese growers may cut costs even further, causing more problems for Darjeeling producers in the long run.“The main issue facing the entire tea industry is that tea costs too much to make, and customers do not want to pay more for it,” said Brandon Friedman, CEO of Rakkasan Tea, a direct to consumer tea company. “If you have bigger factories that mass produce [Nepalese] tea, that could be an issue [for Darjeeling].”Additional reporting by Susannah Savage More

(Reuters) -Salvage crews worked to lift the first piece of Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge from the water on Saturday to allow barges and tugboats to access the disaster site, Maryland and U.S. officials said, the first step in a complex effort to reopen the city’s blocked port.The steel truss bridge collapsed early on Tuesday morning, killing six road workers, when a massive container ship lost power and crashed into a support pylon. Much of the span crashed into the Patapsco River, blocking the Port of Baltimore’s shipping channel.Maryland Governor Wes Moore told a news conference that a section of the bridge’s steel superstructure north of the crash site would be cut into a piece that could be lifted by crane onto a barge and brought to the nearby Tradepoint Atlantic site at Sparrows Point.”This will eventually allow us to open up a temporary restricted channel that will help us to get more vessels in the water around the site of the collapse,” Moore said.He declined to provide a timeline for this portion of the clearance work. “It’s not going to take hours,” he said. “It’s not going to take days, but once we complete this phase of the work, we can move more tugs and more barges and more boats into the area to accelerate our recovery.”Workers will not yet attempt to remove a crumpled part of the bridge’s superstructure that is resting on the bow of the Dali, the 984-foot Singapore-flagged container ship that brought down the bridge. Moore said it was unclear when the ship could be moved, but said that its hull, while damaged, is “intact.””This is a remarkably complex operation,” Moore said of the effort to clear bridge debris and open the Port of Baltimore to shipping traffic.The bodies of two workers who were repairing the bridge deck at the time of the disaster have been recovered, but Moore said efforts to recover four others presumed dead remain suspended because conditions are too dangerous for divers to work amid too much debris.Coast Guard Rear Admiral Shannon Gilreath told reporters that teams from the Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy’s salvage arm and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the debris from the Patapsco River’s deep-draft shipping channel would have to be removed before the Dali could be moved.Saturday’s operation involves cutting a piece just north of that channel and lifting it with a 160-ton marine crane onto a barge. A larger, 1,000-ton crane also is at the bridge site.The piece will be brought to Tradepoint Atlantic, the site of the former Bethlehem Steel Mill which is being developed into a distribution center for companies including Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Home Depot (NYSE:HD) and Volkswagen (ETR:VOWG_p). The facility’s port, which sits on the Chesapeake Bay side of the collapsed bridge, is fully operational.Tradepoint Atlantic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the company’s role in the salvage operation.Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefield said that Tradepoint officials had agreed to allow other ships to unload vehicles at the facility’s deepwater dock to be prepared for shipment to dealers.In Oklahoma, authorities said on Saturday they shut down a portion of U.S. highway 59 near Sallisaw after a barge struck a bridge over the Arkansas River. There were no immediate reports of injuries, according to media reports, and officials would be conducting inspections of the bridge. Five days after the tragedy in Maryland, the jobs of some 15,000 people whose work revolves around daily port operation are on hold. While logistics experts say that other East Coast ports should be able to handle container traffic, Baltimore is the largest U.S. port for “roll-on, roll-off” vehicle imports and exports of farm and construction equipment.U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said the Small Business Administration has approved the state’s request for a disaster declaration that allows small firms affected by the disaster to apply for emergency low-interest loans of up to $2 million through the end of 2024.The federal government on Thursday awarded Maryland an initial $60 million in emergency funds to clear debris and begin rebuilding the Key Bridge, an extraordinarily fast disbursement. President Joe Biden has pledged that the federal government would cover all costs of removing the debris and rebuilding the bridge. More

“Europe could cut interest rates before the U.S.,” Holzmann told Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung, noting that the European economy was growing more slowly than its U.S. counterpart.Holzmann, 75, who is governor of the Austrian National Bank, also told the paper that he would not seek a second term at the helm of the country’s central bank. His term is due to run until the end of August 2025.When rate cuts would come was currently under discussion within the ECB’s Governing Council, Holzmann said.”From today’s perspective, I’d say: interest rate cuts are likely to come. When will depend largely on what wage and price developments look like by June,” he added.The lower wage agreements in Europe were, the more scope there would be to reduce borrowing costs, Holzmann said. More

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the City of Osaka jointly inspected the factory in Osaka that had made the supplements containing “Beni-Koji” red yeast, suspected of having caused health damage, the ministry official said.News footage showed officials entering the factory, and the official said the ministry could search other related locations. The factory, which made the product until December, had been closed due to ageing facilities, Japanese media said.The Osaka-based company could not immediately be reached for comment. Yuko Tomiyama, head of Kobayashi’s investor relations, told public broadcaster NHK the firm intends to sincerely deal with the matter and fully cooperate with the investigation.Kobayashi said on Friday it was investigating a suspected link between the products and their effects on the kidney since it received reports of kidney disease linked to the products.As of Thursday evening, 114 people had been hospitalised and five had died after taking the supplements, which were marketed as helping lower cholesterol levels, according to the company.Kobayashi said it is examining the earnings impact of the latest issues.Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi criticised the company on Tuesday for its slow response, saying it was regrettable that Kobayashi took two months to announce the health impacts of its products.The company has been recalling products with Beni-Koji in recent days after receiving reports of kidney ailments. Its products are also consumed in places such as China, and Japanese media said a case of acute renal failure had been reported in Taiwan.A Chinese consumers association urged consumers to stop using affected products, saying it was concerned about the risk of Kobayashi products, state media reported on Friday.Beni-Koji contains Monascus purpureus, a red mould that is also used as a red colouring in some foods. Puberulic acid – a potent antibacterial and antimalarial agent that can be produced from blue mould and can be toxic – was confirmed in a batch of the products that caused health complaints, Japanese media said. More

Gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons at concertgoers over a week ago in the worst attack in Russia in two decades which left at least 144 people dead. Four of the suspected gunmen are Tajik citizens and were arrested along with seven other suspects, some of whom also come from the ex-Soviet Central Asian nation.”We receive a lot of calls. These are most likely not complaints about harassment, but fear of our citizens, panic, many want to leave. We are now monitoring the situation, we have more people coming (to Tajikistan) than leaving,” Shakhnoza Nodiri, deputy head of the ministry, was quoted by Russian state news agency TASS as saying. Tajikistan detained nine people this week suspected of having links to the mass shooting and also to the militant Islamist State group that claimed responsibility, a Tajik security source told Reuters.A labour shortage in Russia’s economy may become even worse due to the outflow of migrant workers, with a deficit in the construction industry growing by 36% this year compared to 2022, Anton Glushkov, president of the National Association of Builders (NOSTROY), told Interfax news agency on Friday.The Russian Central Bank has said that staff shortages and resulting jump in wages were among risks to inflation that have compelled it to keep the key interest rate elevated.Tajikistan’s labour ministry expects that the outflow of migrants from Russia will be temporary.According to the ministry’s website, 652,014 labour migrants left the country in 2023 compared to 775,578 in 2022. More

“A large number of Luxeed S7 vehicles have already rolled off the production line and are now being transported for delivery to customers,” Richard Yu, managing director and chairman of Huawei’s smart car solutions, posted on the Weibo (NASDAQ:WB) social media platform.Huawei had said problems delivering the premium brand electric vehicle (EV) should be resolved from April, local media reported this month.Chery had lodged complaints with Huawei over how production issues with a computing unit made by the tech company had caused delays to deliveries of the vehicles, Reuters reported in January. The S7 sedan – the first model for Chery’s Luxeed EV brand – had orders of about 20,000 as of Nov. 28. It is priced from 249,800 yuan ($34,600).Huawei’s revenues grew the fastest in four years in 2023, with a rebound in its consumer segment and income from new businesses like smart car components accelerating its recovery from U.S. sanctions.Last year Huawei announced it would spin off the smart car unit into a new company. Yu said this month the unit would likely turn a profit from April after losing billions of yuan in the past year, local media reported.($1 = 7.2203 Chinese yuan renminbi) More

(Reuters) – A federal judge in Texas on Friday blocked enforcement of new regulations adopted during the Biden administration that sought to overhaul how lenders extend loans and other services to low- and moderate-income Americans.U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, sided with banking and business groups including the American Bankers Association and U.S. Chamber of Commerce in finding the new rules ran afoul of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.The judge, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction blocking their enforcement before they could take effect Monday. The agencies and trade groups did not respond to requests for comment.The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last year updated their rules enforcing the 1977 fair lending law, which seeks to ensure banks lend in their local communities. Conceived to prevent red lining – a discriminatory practice where banks refuse or offer only limited lending to certain areas or populations, primarily minorities – CRA regulations gauge how well banks service areas where they operate. The new rules broadened the geographies in which lenders were be required to extend loans and other services to low-income Americans, a change regulators said was needed to reflect the rise of online banking and the decline of bank branches.But Kacsmaryk agreed with the business and banking groups who had sued in February in finding the new regulations went beyond what the 1977 law authorized.He said the rules went too far by allowing banks be assessed not just in the geographic areas they maintain physical branches but also in other areas in which they conduct retail lending and by allowing the regulators to assess the availability of a bank’s deposit products, not just credit, in a community.Kacsmaryk said the agencies never before claimed authority to assess banks wherever they conducted retail lending. “On the contrary, they have — since 1978 — limited themselves to areas surrounding deposit-taking facilities,” he said.Kacsmaryk is the lone active judge in Amarillo, helping make his courthouse a favored venue for conservative litigants challenging federal government policies during President Joe Biden’s administration.He gained national attention last year when he suspended approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the pill to remain on the market while it considers the case, which it heard arguments in on Tuesday.The U.S. Judicial Conference, the judiciary’s policymaking body, earlier this month adopted a discretionary policy that aims to ensure cases challenging laws are randomly assigned judges and cannot be “judge shopped” by litigants to sympathetic jurists in single-judge courts.(This story has been refiled to fix the link to the ruling in paragraph 3) More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration will soon announce a 10% cap on yearly rent increases for certain affordable housing units that are subsidized by the federal government, a senior administration official said on Friday.The step restricts rent increases by property owners if they are part of a tax credit program for low-income housing, the official added, confirming details reported by the Washington Post.The new regulations will be announced on Monday, the official said.The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development did not immediately respond to a request for comment.With worries about high rents and mortgage interest rates contributing to voters’ sour views about the economy, Biden, a Democrat, will aim to tout his administration’s latest proposals to make housing more affordable as he campaigns for re-election against Republican former President Donald Trump.Trump has lambasted Biden’s economic policies, blaming them for inflation in multiple sectors of the economy.The White House has also called on Congress to support investments to lower housing costs. Congress is unlikely to pass major legislation in an election year, but the president’s discussion of the topic reflects awareness of the impact it could have on his re-election hopes. More