Kenya approves new purple tea variety for production
Kenya, the world's biggest black tea exporter, has authorized the commercial cultivation of a new variety of purple tea with high medicinal value. The country hopes the new variety will help growers diversify their products through value-addition and penetrate the specialty tea market. The new purple variety, or clone, has higher medicinal properties than green and black tea and its seeds produce oil suitable for cooking, cosmetics and the pharmaceutical industries. Kenya hopes to match last year's record-setting earnings from tea exports, thanks to stable prices and favorable exchange rates. Production is expected to fall by approximately 10% this year, because of bad weather in several tea growing areas.