Eurasianet | 05/13/2020
Tens of thousands of Georgian workers are unable to access Turkish tea plantations while the border remains closed. Cultivators are anxious over debt and further privatization.
Sevcan Altunkaya was 15 when she started picking tea on her family’s farm on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. Like many young people in the rural region, she left after high school. The Georgian border is a brisk one-hour walk and her family could easily find Georgians – mostly young women from remote mountain villages – happy for the work.
That border is now sealed and the Georgians’ jobs another mass casualty of COVID-19.
Some 200,000 families like Altunkaya’s who live off of tea are now suddenly struggling to find workers in the aging communities of northeastern Turkey. This reshuffling threatens a precarious system and may accelerate the privatization of the country’s last state-dependent crop. It’s one many might call critical: Turks drink more tea than any other nation, an estimated 1,300 cups per person annually.
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 