No Tea Seed For New Guinea Venture

New Guinea Venture

SYDNEY tea merchants report that advices from overseas make it clear that the scarcity of tea-seed presents the greatest obstacle, at present, to open ing up new tea-growing areas. The es tablished tea growing countries regard the industry as their own close preserve.

Suitable tea. country is available in East Africa: but export of seed thereto has been prohibited by India, Ceylon and the Netherlands East Indies since the East African territories withdrew from the International Tea Agreement in 1947.

The Australian government engaged a tea expert from India to inspect likely growing areas in New Guinea but the same trouble over seed developed there.

The expert decided that Aiyura, in the New Guinea Central Highlands, was the most suitable locality for growing high grade tea.

But the governments of both India and Ceylon refused to make seed available.

Unless they can be persuaded to modify their restrictions there seems little likeli hood of the industry becoming firmly established in New Guinea.

As far as Aiyura is concerned, lab(pur and transport would be added difficulties.

Tea could be grown in the more acces ;<lble, low-land areas of New Guinea but it would not be of good quality.

IT may be recalled that a similar diffi culty developed in New Guinea nearly 20 years ago, when Agriculture Director George Murray wanted to try out the Cinchona plant (source of quinine) on the highlands. The Netherlands Indies folk, who held the auinine monopoly, resolutely refused to let any Cinchona

seed leave the East Indies; and Mr.

Murray finally had to resort to cunning.

He was in Singapore; and he went across to Java and somehow got a handful of seed. His account of how he smuggled the seed out, and his joy in the achieve ment, made an amusing story. That seed, tenderly cherished, is the origin of the Cinchona plantations on the Ramu tablelands to-day. But they do not matter so much now: science, in its war against malaria, is by-passing quinine.