Globalization and market liberalization has opened attractive opportunities for the emerging
economies to internationalize their agricultural products in the global market. The economy of
many developing countries, especially in South Asia, highly depends on agriculture. In context of
Nepal, huge population living in southeastern and other rural areas of the country directly or
indirectly depends on tea farming for their livelihood. Tea is one of the potential export commodity
of Nepal, which is highly demanded in the international markets. With the opportunities on
internationalizing agricultural products in developed markets, emerging countries usually face
challenges and difficulties in meeting international quality standard requirements. Thus,
implementation of sustainable supply chain management in agriculture sector has become an
essential factor to maintain efficiency and create effective value adding activities throughout the
upstream and downstream supply chain.
The purpose of this thesis report is to analyze the current supply chain practices of the commodity
tea in Nepal and identify the key players along the supply chain, presenting all the general value
chain activities involved in the industry. The study aims to categorize the bottlenecks of the
economic leakage in final tea market, seek for the possible ways of strengthening efficiency and
suggest on implementing sustainable supply chain management approaches to achieve
competitive advantages in the international markets.
After the review of relevant literature on value chain and supply chain, the thesis adopted supply
chain management theories as a framework for analyzing the value creating process, and
activities involved in agro-supply chain processes. In relation to the various aspects of global
supply chain theories the research intends to highlight the common global sustainable agrosupply
chain barriers, determine the major factors that constraints against tea supply in Nepal
and suggest the best possible ways of executing viable agro-supply chain practices.
The study adopted a qualitative research design in which document analysis and interviews were
used as data collection methods. The interviews conducted with stakeholders involved in the
Nepalese tea industry revealed several interesting facts and exposed different aspects of tea
supply chain practices in the country.
Analysis of data collected reveal number of issues such as, poor government policy and support,
and absence of other basic facilities, as major constraints to the growth of the industry. The study
concludes that, with an improvement in the accessibility to basic infrastructural facilities,
maintenance of healthy relation with different stakeholders throughout the supply chain, and the
implementation of sustainable agricultural production policies, the Nepalese tea supply-chain
would be efficient enough to launch the country’s tea industry as major player in the global tea
market.