Dates, events, facts

Africans destroy robots to replace them on plantations

Tea pickers in Kenya are eliminating robots to replace them in their plantations. Ten such cars were burned in the last year, most of them belonged to the tea manufacturer Lipton. The loss of the company was 1.2 million dollars.

Robots of some models can replace a hundred workers at once and reduce the cost of picking tea from 11 cents to three per kilogram.

In the last ten years, cars have deprived 30 thousand people of their jobs in Kericho district alone. Therefore, the local government advised the agro-industrial holdings to collect at least 40 percent of the tea by hand.

2021 Kenya exported $1.2 billion worth of tea. This made it the third largest supplier in the world after China and Sri Lanka. Unemployment in Kenya is the highest in East Africa. 

news.am