A visit to a virtuous cooperative: Tinjure. Ilam, Nepal.

I visited in January a model tea cooperative in eastern Nepal, coming all the way from Darjeeling, where I had left my fieldwork team, with a backbreaking 10hrs drive through impossible roads, the horrible dusty crowded roads of Siliguri, and menacing border patrols in the India-Nepal frontier.

And the next day, another 4 hrs by jeep arranged by my friend Narendra Gurung to Tinjure, no rest at all but I was repayed by wondrous views of Everest, Lhotse, Makalu on a cliff.

Tinjure is run by an administrator, and a very well assorted management pool that control every phase of operation, tea harvesting, agriculture, processing, manufacturing, and selling. They are elected every two years and very amiable in the way they welcomed us and showed us the fields and the small factory that they have installed thanks to some loans.

Their organic principles and methods are fantastic, and admirable: they stress very much importance on mulching between the tea lines, and the composting of everything, that is then redistributed to their very fertile land, at 2000 meters, tea fields interspersed with bananas, many species of wild flowers, leopards in the lower reaches, bamboos, etc. Animal sheds are being implemented among all the farmers of the cooperative, who are active shareholders and get a dividend every year after the earnings are summed up and assessed. Buffaloes and cows and their manure are collected in a very ingenuous system and redistributed to the tea fields. Farmers, with whom we interacted for a whole day, are friendly, hard-working, positive that they are doing the right thing, they are going the right way as a collective organization in which everyone has individual and communal responsibilities. They have been certified Rainforest Alliance and Organic by one of the EU's main bodies, so far.

We will soon introduce to our shop Tinjure's teas, with all their spontaneous, natural, woody, high mountain complex fragrances. I was impressed by their golden red tea and by their white tea.

What a great possibility of cultural research and life experience it was

January 19th 2025

Giacomo from Hermitage tea

Circular Economy of Tea and Tea Anthropology Research Group