In 2019, Baaka, 28 years old, and his childhood friend Nika, 30 years old, rehabilitated 25 hectares of tea plantations in Georgia, joining a movement that is reviving an industry that was all but lost in the country.
Georgia’s strategic location makes it a natural logistics and transit hub along the “new Silk Road,” linking trade between Asia and Europe.
ADB and its partners have long recognised that when national economies become more connected regionally, the results are closer trade integration, more efficient intraregional supply chains, and stronger financial links.
The people in this film are not associated with ADB, but they are affected by many of the issues that ADB is addressing in countries across Asia and the Pacific.
Transcript
The tea grown here is known as green gold.
It is the same name that we chose for our company, GreenGold.
Forty or fifty years ago in this region of Georgia, there used to be twenty-eight tea factories.
Some villages even had two to three tea plantations.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia’s tea plantations were all but abandoned.
In 2019, Baaka, 28 years old, and his childhood friend Nika, 30 years old, rehabilitated 25 hectares of tea plantations.
They employ previously unemployed local people to pick, prepare, and pack the leaves, and now sell their tea across the world.
Nika Sioridze
Co-founder, GreenGold
Georgia
So, we started building a factory.
Nothing grew for the first three years.
By the fourth, fifth year, we were able to start picking the tea leaves.
We started selling our tea across Europe.
We even exported tea to Germany.
Georgia’s strategic location makes it a natural logistics and transit hub along the “new Silk Road,” linking trade between Asia and Europe.
Baaka Babunashvili
Co-founder, GreenGold
Georgia
The Asian market is one of our targets.
We have never sold tea in the Asian market.
However, there is a huge tea culture in Asia, so we need to enter that market by offering new flavors of tea produced in Georgia.
At the Asian Development Bank, we believe that cross-border trade and other kinds of regional cooperation are key to achieving economic growth and narrowing development gaps.
Our environment allows us to have 100% natural tea.
We are literally in the forest.
We just need to deliver a natural product with typical Georgian flavors.
Your story. Your generation. Your Asia and the Pacfiic.
Source: Asian Development Bank