Every time it rains heavily in Turkey’s spectacular Black Sea tea growing region - where it rains a lot - Zikrullah Komurcu starts to worry. Last August he was almost swept away by a mudslide when a tea garden above his home in the village of Abdullahhoca began to slide down the mountain during a downpour. The house above his was destroyed with part of the field ending up in his kitchen.
“It’s a miracle that no one was killed,” Komurcu told AFP, an electricity pylon still perched dangerously over his mud-splattered home. The tea-growing province of Rize in Turkey’s northeast has been repeatedly hit by major landslides over the last 50 years. Nearly twice as wet as Ireland, with 2.
2 meters (86 inches) of annual rainfall, the Turkish disaster agency AFAD said last year alone there were 355 serious landslides there affecting homes. And it is going to get worse, experts warn, with climate change making the Black Sea warmer and rainstorms even more violent, putting still more pressure on the soil. Dangerous monoculture Hakan Yanbay, of the province’s chamber of geological engineers, said the “uncontrolled” construction of roads cut into the sides of mountains to link its scattered villages has exacerbated the problem.
They undermine the stability of the soil of the mountainous region, 80 percent of which is made up of steep hillsides. Yanbay blames the spread of tea plantations over the last century for much of the soil erosion. Long encouraged by the state, they n.
