Turkish authorities projected that tea yield loss in the Black Sea region this year is expected to exceed the average level of the past five years due to climate factors, the Demiroren news agency reported Wednesday.
The significant drop this year is due to insufficient rainfall and high temperatures caused by the global warming effects, said the report.
Over the last five years, annual yield losses stood at 20 percent, Mehmet Erdogan, president of the Rize Commodity Exchange, told Demiroren.
He said works have been going on to determine the precise amount of loss in yield this year, and the amount of tea harvest delivered so far was not promising.
In the Turkish Black Sea provinces of Rize, Trabzon, Artvin, and Giresun, the harvest period continues on 830,000 decares (about 83,000 hectares) of land, where approximately 1 million producer families engage in wet tea cultivation, according to the report.
“We started to see the effects of global warming more deeply in the region,” he said, adding that changes and instability of the precipitation regime and high temperatures have impacted the area.
