Tea

Tea is the most popular manufactured drink consumed in the world. The amount consumed is equivalent to all of the others – including coffee, soft drinks, and alcohol – combined.

Selling tea provides a livelihood to millions of people in the producing countries, the largest of which are China, India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka. However, the industry is also rife with dire problems, particularly terrible working conditions on Indian tea plantations. 

Types of tea covered 

This guide covers all tea from the Camellia sinensis plant. That includes black tea (‘normal tea’ in British parlance), white tea, yellow tea, green tea, oolong, pu-erh and Earl Grey. 

The difference between these is just the processing. Black tea and pu-erh are fully oxidised (broken up and then left to ferment – the process is stopped by heating); the others are unoxidised or partially oxidised. Earl Grey is black tea with the addition of oil of bergamot. We have a separate guide to herbal teas. 

Tea certification schemes 

There is quite a complex array of different certifications used which are shown below. Brands of the same company group are shown together. 

Read our feature on certification schemes for profiles on Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, organic and more. 

The greenhouse gas emissions of tea

If you put cow’s milk in your tea, it can easily amount to about the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the whole of the rest of the drink. Cows are high greenhouse gas emitters, partly due to belching so much methane. To find out how to avoid contributing to this, see our guide to plant milks.

Discounting the milk, the biggest portion of the greenhouse gas emissions comes from boiling the kettle – more than all of the cultivation, processing and transport combined. It is thus definitely worth making sure that you don’t overfill it.

The total carbon emissions of a cup of tea are about 40 g CO2eq for black tea, or double it for tea with milk. The average UK per capita carbon emissions (including imports) are about 13 tonnes CO2eq per year. So, drinking ten cups of milky tea a day will amount to about 2% of your carbon footprint – it’s not a transatlantic flight, but it’s still worth not overfilling the kettle.

East African tea producers

The bulk of our tea comes from Kenya, and the system under which it is produced there is very different from in India (see below). For one thing, two-thirds of Kenyan tea is produced by smallholders. 

This is more representative of global production nowadays. Although tea was traditionally produced on plantations, and in India about three-quarters of it still is, there has been a huge growth in the smallholder contribution over the past twenty years. They now produce most of the tea in the world.

More than three million Kenyan families depend on selling tea for their livelihoods. It is a very important source of income: one report stated: “tea smallholder farmers in Kenya are perceived as relatively well-off compared to other smallholder farmer types.”

However, that doesn’t mean that there are no social problems in Kenyan tea. Children are known to work on tea farms. And the employees that smallholders employ tend to be paid very little and to have very few rights.

Structural problems

As is often the case, it is the downstream stages of tea manufacturing where the big profits are made: blending (selecting the different types of tea from different places to mix together), packing (making it into tea bags, or into packs of loose tea) and marketing. 

Yet tea is generally exported as dust or leaves and all of these high-profit downstream activities occur in importing countries.

Unfortunately, packed-at-origin tea, exported from Kenya as a finished product, doesn’t currently seem to exist, so it isn’t really possible to address this problem as a consumer. It may be something to watch for the future however, as Sri Lanka has successfully moved into exporting some of its tea in finished form, so it doesn’t seem to be impossible.

The vast bulk of tea internationally is sold in enormous auctions, and tea trading is, as per usual, very concentrated. Seven companies buy 90% of the tea traded into Europe and North America: Unilever, Tata, and Associated British Foods; Van Rees and James Finlay (these two are traders which don’t sell to consumers); and Teekanne and Ostfriesische Tee Gesellschaft (these two do sell branded tea but not in the UK).

Improving things for Kenyan farmers 

Reports about certification schemes in Kenya have been more positive than in India.

Fairtrade was set up for smallholder farmers. To be certified, smallholders need to belong to co-ops, and decisions about how the premium is to be spent are made by the co-op. It is still the case that the most powerless players can get left out of the decision making, particularly smallholders’ employees. However, the system inherently involves the democratic participation of a bigger group than it does in the case of estates. 

As well as more positive reports about Fairtrade, there are also more positive reports about Utz and Rainforest Alliance than in India, suggesting that they can improve both livelihoods and environmental protection.

The appalling conditions on Indian tea plantations

Although tea is strongly associated with India in many people’s minds, only about 20% of our tea comes from there; most of it comes from East Africa.

However, Indian tea is considered a vital part of many blends, particularly the tea from Assam, the ‘tea state’, where the bulk of Indian tea is produced. Assam has very hot and humid weather which gives its tea a strong, malty flavour. It is considered to add ‘body’ to a blend.

The issues in India – particularly Assam – are profound. The tea industry of the Raj was famous for extremely brutal treatment of workers, and we still seem to be living in its very dark shadow. 

The plantation system

Most Indian tea is produced on huge plantations, or ‘estates’, under a system that was established during British rule. Thousands of people work on each estate, and over a million people work on the tea estates in Assam alone. 

The plantation system could be viewed as a system of semi-bondage. Workers don’t just work on the plantation, they live on the plantation. To keep living there, a family must have at least one member working there, and jobs are passed to next of kin. Nearly all of the families have been living and working there for generations, having been brought there by the British from other parts of India. This means that they often are quite culturally isolated – most still speak a different language from the other locals – and are generally regarded as ‘outsiders’.

This system has put the workers in a quite powerless position as, if they stopped working on the plantation, they would have to leave their homes.

Wages and conditions on tea plantations

The supposed ‘minimum’ wage for tea workers is set on a regional basis by a collective bargaining agreement between the government, certain unions and the plantation owners. It is actually not a minimum, it is what all tea workers get paid. 

The rate is much lower than the minimum wage for other Indian workers. This is because much of the wage is supposed to be provided ‘in kind’ in the form of housing, healthcare and food. Plantation employers have been required to provide these things since the Plantations Labour Act of 1951. 

The big problem is that these ‘in kind’ benefits are generally not actually happening. Thus, workers have to use their paltry wages to pay for these things too. The conditions are worst in Assam. The Assam labour minister has himself described the conditions on the tea estates as “almost like slavery.”

Tea workers have to pick 24 kg of tea each day, which means picking extremely fast all day. If they fail, deductions are made from their already meagre wages. Meanwhile healthcare and sanitation are minimal or non-existent and food rations are insufficient. Workers are also subject to frequent intimidation and abuse. A recent study by Sheffield University found that debt bondage is quite common, with workers having borrowed money from their employers at usurious rates of interest.

Certification doesn’t seem to be helping 

Many sources have reported that certification (of all kinds – Fairtrade, Utz and Rainforest Alliance) doesn’t mean better conditions in the Indian tea estates. The Sheffield University study found “very little difference between the labour practices and living standards of ethically certified and non-certified tea plantations.”

The Fairtrade Foundation points out that the lack of difference on the Fairtrade ones may be because they generally only manage to sell a small percentage of their tea on Fairtrade terms, in some cases as little as 2%. That means that they won’t be reaping much of the financial benefits of certification – they won’t get much Fairtrade premium. A producer being Fairtrade certified only means that they have the right to sell their produce as Fairtrade if they can find a buyer, it doesn’t mean that they actually do. Read more about certification schemes in our feature. 

However, local workers’ rights campaigners from Assam have claimed that the Fairtrade premium doesn’t always get spent on things that benefit workers. A joint committee of management and workers is supposed to decide how it is spent, but they say that the workers are frequently too terrified of the management to contribute meaningfully.

There has always been controversy about Fairtrade certifying large estates, due to the likelihood of problems like this arising. 

Rainforest Alliance and Utz also put out a statement after the publication of the Sheffield University study, saying that the situation in Assam is particularly challenging and that standards alone could not resolve it.

Read our comparison of certification schemes in our feature. 

How much is the industry struggling?

The estate owners are a mix of international companies, Indian businesses and private individuals.

How much the working conditions are due to the Indian tea industry struggling financially is hard to tell. Campaigners have pointed out that conditions are very similar across estates who sell both expensive and cheap tea, and argued that they can’t all be equally broke.

However, the estate owners claim that they are on the verge of financial collapse. Prices are very low, and climate change is making it harder to grow tea in India profitably.

Conditions on the estates have worsened since the 1990s, when India started implementing free trade reforms: opening its borders to imported tea which resulted in a collapse in domestic prices, and cutting government support to the industry.

The resistance

Indian tea workers are not just lying down and taking all of this. Unrest has been growing, particularly over the last decade, with strikes and protests at tea estates, hunger strikes, and occasional outbreaks of violence.

As a result, things have started to change, albeit only incrementally. After years of stagnation, since 2015 the agreed wage has risen somewhat in Assam. However, it is still very low. Traidcraft Exchange (the campaigning part of Traidcraft) is running a campaign called ‘Who Picked my Tea?” to get the big six UK tea companies to reveal the names of all the tea estates from which they source. 

It argues that this will make it much easier for campaigners to pressurise estate owners to improve conditions. The tea companies do have Supply Chain Codes of Conduct but, while nobody knows which bit of tea comes from where, nobody is in a position to call out estates who are flaunting them. 

Four of the big six have now revealed them: Yorkshire, Twinings, Clipper and Tetley. (It is too soon to see any results of this yet). That leaves PG Tips and Typhoo to go.

What we can do 

Given that the conditions are reported to be similar throughout, it is not easy to know what to do as a consumer. Just ceasing to buy tea from Assam would do more harm than good – the workers depend on the tea estates. 

Buying Fairtrade may have some value as, if there was more premium kicking around, it is possible that at least some of it would be used in ways that would benefit workers. However, given what the campaigners from Assam say, it doesn’t seem sufficient to rely on it on its own. Utz and Rainforest Alliance don’t seem to be very meaningful in this context. 

One thing that you can do is join Traidcraft’s campaign and write to the two tea companies who haven’t yet revealed which tea estates they source from.