Our Cooperative
Our cooperative is composed of smallholder tea farmers coming from 4 villages and involved in harvesting and processing the teas from their forest gardens. Our members are all upland tea producers from Nyot Ou district, northernmost territory of Laos.
Our producers have been working with the Lao-French NGO CCL for more than 12 years to improve the quality of Nyot Ou teas, and to take care of what makes our teas so specials: the forest.
- Institute agroecology as a key principle of our tea production and ensure the preservation of our ecosystem and biodiversity thanks to our common chart and production guidelines.
- Encourage exchanges among our producers to help them learn new skills, knowledge, and best agroecological practices (production and processing workshops, training on agroecological methods, tea producer cupping events...).
- Help you to find us and discover our teas. As we live remotely in the mountains, we do not have easily access to tea lovers around the world. The cooperative allows us to make our teas know beyond our territory borders.
All our Members share our common principles. Any tea producer from our cooperative villages who fits the criteria defined by the cooperative chart, namely having free-pesticides gardens with a minimum age of 8 years and located at a minimum altitude of 900 meters with forest cover, can apply as member if he/she agrees and signs our producer chart defining our agroecological standards of production, harvesting, and processing.
Our management committee consists of members of the cooperative and is elected every five years at our annual cooperative member meeting. 50% of our management committee members are women.
The core objective of our cooperative is to produce and commercialize premium tea from the Nyot Ou terroir through the maintenance and development of agro-ecological practices aimed at increasing the incomes of tea-producing smallholder farmer families, their well-being and to ensure sustainable and ecological management of the resource”. -
Nyot Ou tea cooperative statutes, February 2022.