An international tea conference is due to begin in Kenya on Sunday to discuss the global glut position with plea to stop expansion of area under tea cultivation, organizers said on Saturday.

The International Tea Business Conference, organized by the Tea Board of Kenya (TBK) in conjunction with UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will bring together more than 250 tea producers, processors, consumers, researchers and regulatory agencies from 47 countries around the world.

The Tea Board of Kenya said the conference, which runs until Friday next week, will discuss fair trade and ethical business practices, value addition through developing diversified tea products and information exchange between producers, consumers, traders and packers.

The meeting came as the east African nation urged top tea producers to concentrate on growing top quality teas to boost prices that have been depressed in the last few years by a glut in the global market.

"We want to urge all other countries to produce quality tea so that our major concern should not be the volume of tea only, it should be the quality of tea that we produce," Kenyan Agriculture Minister Kipruto Arap Kirwa said.

The east African nation accounts for 22 percent of the global tea market and ranks among the world's three leading black tea producers together with India and Sri Lanka.

Kenya produced 328 million kg of tea last year. Officials say they are watching the effects of heavy rain pounding most of the country before giving final 2006 production estimates.

Source: Xinhua