Trai Quang Soi Tea is at risk of disappearing.

Famous for a time

Trai Quang Soi tea has a history of hundreds of years, and has entered the folk subconscious through songs such as: "If you are smart, drink Trai tea/ If you are foolish, drink Me tea" or "If you want to eat white rice and carp/ Then go to Ba Trai to pick tea with me". According to local people, since the feudal period, tea has been grown here in large plantations. Later, through many ups and downs, the area increased and decreased, but the people here are always proud of the quality of their tea.

Mr. Luong Truong Yen (Tan Nhuan village, Quang Son commune) analyzed: Tea leaves in other places usually have dark green, tough leaves, large veins, many veins, few serrations, but the tea variety here has yellow-green leaves, thick and crispy, small veins, sparse and many serrations around the edges of the leaves. It is this special tea variety combined with the climate and soil conditions of the semi-mountainous region with a large amount of radiation, the soil contains a high clay content that makes Trai Quang Soi tea have a very unique flavor, slightly astringent, sweet aftertaste, rich, and the color of the tea is golden like honey. Tea here is always loved by consumers in the province as well as neighboring provinces such as Nam Dinh, Thanh Hoa, Thai Binh, chosen to use as a daily drink.

In 2019, the Department of Intellectual Property, Ministry of Science and Technology granted a certificate of protection for the certification trademark "Che Trai Quang Soi", which further affirms the quality and characteristics of the tea products here.

Trai Quang Soi Tea is at risk of disappearing. — It took Ms. Tran Thi Van (Group 7, Tay Son Ward) 3 days to sell a shipment of tea with a volume of only a few hundred kilograms.

Working as an agent, specializing in importing and distributing tea from Quang Soi region to many places for 20 years, Ms. Tran Thi Van (Group 7, Tay Son Ward) shared: The characteristic of tea in this region is that people almost do not harvest buds but only sell fresh tea (picking old leaves and cutting branches). The tea is delicious, so customers everywhere love it. The prosperous time was around 2016-2018, cars and motorbikes of traders came and went, buying and selling bustlingly. My family alone exports tons of tea every day, not to mention nearly 20 other agents. But sadly, currently, product consumption has become difficult. In the whole region, only my family and another agent are able to maintain the profession, but they only sell sparingly, loading goods once every 3 days, each time a few hundred kilograms.

Mr. Tran Quoc Toan, Chairman of the Farmers' Association of Quang Son Commune, said: Tea used to be a strategic crop for economic development, contributing greatly to increasing income and creating jobs for local workers. From growing tea, many households here have escaped poverty and become rich. According to statistics, in 2015, the whole commune had about 170 hectares of tea with 5-6 hundred households and more than a thousand workers participating in tea production. However, up to this point, although there are no exact statistics, it is estimated that the tea area is only about 15-20 hectares.

Why?

We visited some key tea production areas such as the villages of Tan Nhuan, Tan Trung, Tan Thuong, Tan Ha... of Quang Son commune. The vast, green tea hills of the past have almost disappeared, replaced by pineapple and corn trees. Looking closely, we can see a few rows of isolated, bare, and barren tea trees due to lack of care.

Meeting Ms. Trinh Thi Phuong, Tan Thuong village, who was quickly weeding the newly planted pineapple field, we asked her why she abandoned tea to grow pineapple. She explained: "Tea here is good and delicious, but now it is no longer effective. Before, 1 ton of tea was sold for 6 million, now it is 3.5 million, while labor, materials, and fertilizers have all increased. Not to mention, many times we called traders until the phone was "burning" but they didn't come to buy anything. So my family destroyed 1 hectare of tea 2-3 years ago to switch to growing pineapple."

Many people believe that there are too many drinks on the market for consumers to choose from. Even in tea growing areas, people used to drink green tea day after day, but now each day there is a different type, such as lotus leaf, vằng tea, guava leaf, ginseng, xạ đen, etc., so it is understandable that green tea is "out of favor".

Unable to sell, prices continuously fall, people neglect to invest in fertilization, leading to a vicious cycle, productivity decreases and income decreases even more.

Talking with comrade Nguyen Tien Dat, Vice Chairman of Quang Son Commune People's Committee, it was known that: Recently, many areas in the commune have been subject to land acquisition and clearance to implement major national and provincial projects such as the North-South Expressway and the East-West Road. Therefore, a large area of tea trees has been lost. In addition, due to the increasingly low economic value of tea trees, people have cut them down to plant other trees. The local government is also very concerned about how to preserve and promote this traditional crop. Many options have been proposed such as: Switching to picking buds to process dry tea, but it is not simple because people have long been used to making tea branches, moreover, this requires a lot of labor while agricultural labor is increasingly scarce. The option of preliminary processing and packaging to bring fresh tea branches to the supermarket system is also a way to increase the value of the product, but the problem is who will do it, so far the locality has not found any interested businesses...

From the perspective of a tea processing unit, which has initially succeeded in restoring the Dong Son tea area (Tam Diep city), Mr. Tong Duy Hien, Director of Tam Diep Flower, Ornamental Plants and Agricultural Products Cooperative, said: The biggest problem today is that people are no longer dedicated to tea trees. Young workers go to work for companies, tea trees are neglected, no matter how good the breed or soil is, if not cared for, the yield will not be achieved, and the quality will also be affected.

While the fate of tea trees is still uncertain, there are still some families who cannot bear to destroy them and still preserve the tea gardens that once fed their families. Like Mrs. Lam's tea garden (Group 7, Tay Son Ward), every day, she still takes care of it and carefully picks and trims the leaves, although the tea trees no longer provide her family with a good source of income like before. Mrs. Lam confided: Having been attached to tea trees for almost my entire life, seeing them fade away day by day, I feel extremely regretful. I just hope there is a way to preserve a bit of the tea aroma of this land for the future.

Nguyen Luu

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