"'Tea cartel' formed to boost profits"

I can't think of many other uses for a cartel.
Thank you to a reader, I had missed this.
From The Telegraph (23Jan2013):

The price of a cup of tea could rise after the world's biggest producers agreed to join forces to boost profits, a Sri Lankan minister has announced.  

After two days of talks in Colombo between Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, Indonesia, Malawi and Rwanda, which account for more than 50pc of global production, the nations announced the formation of the International Tea Producers' Forum.

Sri Lanka's Plantations Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said exporting nations had been trying to establish a forum for 80 years. "In that context, what we have just achieved is a historic land mark in the tea industry," he said on Wednesday.

Efforts will initially focus on sharing knowledge and boosting demand for tea to raise prices, but he suggested more sophisticated - and controversial - methods such as supply controls would be raised in the future.

Production quotas "are not part of the objectives listed in the constitution, but I am sure these are matters which will be discussed some time in the future," he added.

In 1994, Colombo proposed a tea cartel on the lines of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the crude oil cartel dominated by Saudi Arabia, but there was no unity among producing nations at the time....MORE 

Here's the recent (lack of) action via Monga Bay:


Tea , average three auctions, arithmetic average of quotations at Kolkata, Colombo and Mombasa/Nairobi. 
 Index Mundi has the monthly data for Mombassa.

See also:
The Great British Tea Heist: Or How England Stole the Secret, Discovered a Fraud and Created the Modern World