This guide covers good agriculture practices in tea farming to help farmers in Myanmar achieve higher yields and higher quality fresh tea leaves. The guide also covers good manufacturing practices, more specifically, tea-processing methods for both green tea and fermented tea as well as basic hygiene and food safety practices that should be followed at all stages of tea production in order to ensure tea making of the highest quality. The section on processing methods covers mainly homemade green tea (as opposed to factory produced green tea) as well as fermented tea production. On the other hand, the section on basic hygiene and food safety practices is applicable to the manufacture of all types of tea and both factory and home production.
Evidently, these guidelines do not include all good agricultural and manufacturing practices relevant to tea production and, as such, should not be considered exhaustive in any way or discourage best practices that are omitted or incompletely described. Rather, this guide provides an overview of the main issues in tea cultivation and processing in Myanmar so that it could be used as a resource for sensitization or training measures, especially where export certification (e.g. organic, HAACP, ISO, FDA, USDA, etc.) is sought.
It is hoped that applicable recommendations included in this guide (or at least the major points) are shared with farmers, processors and distributors of tea in Myanmar with a strong recommendation to comply with them.
