Nigeria is a tea-growing country, but only just. The crop is cultivated almost exclusively in the humid, high-altitude regions of the Mambilla Plateau in Taraba State and around Obudu in Cross River State, where it is processed into black tea by the crush, tear and curl method and sold as Highland Tea, according to a study on tea farming published by Medwin Publishers. National production stands at about 1,640 tonnes a year, meeting only about 10 per cent of domestic need.
Where Nigeria's Tea Grows
The industry centres on one state-owned company. Highland Tea is made by Mambila Beverages Nigeria Limited, wholly owned by the Taraba State Government, which runs an estate of about 615 hectares and a factory designed to produce 1.6 million kilogrammes of tea a year, according to Daily Trust. The company draws additional leaf from roughly 2,000 registered outgrowers cultivating about 800 hectares across villages on the plateau, and there are more than 6,000 tea farms in the area in total, according to the Medwin Publishers study.
A Tenth of the Cup
Even with that base, the factory runs hungry. Less than 30 per cent of the raw tea leaf that local processing industries need is actually supplied, according to the Medwin Publishers study, which put average commercial yields at about 1.5 tonnes per hectare and warned that climate variability threatens output on the plateau. The Mambilla tea factory has a chequered history, having sat abandoned for about two decades before production resumed, a stop-start record that undercut both farmers and the state's ambitions, according to The Guardian.
A Push to Revive It
There is fresh political attention on the crop. At a roundtable convened by the National Coffee and Tea Association of Nigeria, the Taraba State government described the Mambilla Plateau as one of the country's best environments for tea and high-quality coffee, while the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, said the Federal Government would soon distribute seedlings and other inputs to lift coffee and tea production, naming Taraba, Cross River and Plateau among the states with suitable land, according to Champion News. Industry figures have long argued that the plateau could supply far more, given that Nigeria is listed among the world's tea-producing nations largely on the strength of these few thousand farms, according to The Sun.
A revived tea belt would cut import dependence and put money into one of Nigeria's poorer highland economies. FoodPrices Nigeria tracks verified retail prices across Lagos markets and follows the crops whose fortunes shape rural incomes and the cost of everyday goods.