Rethink plan to move tea selling to e-auction platform

The East African Tea Trade Association (EATTA) plans to automate the auction system to move its current open cry to e-auction, a plan that has been in the offing for some time now.

It is hoped that once the auction is digitalised, and open to the world, we will be able to get better prices for our tea, as opposed to the current system where competition is ‘limited’ to the brokers inside the auction room. I find this notion misguided for a number of reasons. It is said that the focus is naturally on price discovery and about finding ‘the real price’.