Episode 38 - Tea

What is tea?

With the exception of water, tea is the most consumed drink in the world. Tea is a beverage that is produced by steeping the young leaves and leaf buds of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, in hot water. I read this description of tea: “[tea] has a slightly cooling, astringent flavor.”

Each year 5.8 million metric tons of tea are produced.

Tea is a woody perennial crop with a lifespan exceeding 100 years. There are some tea plants that are over 1,500 years old in the Yunnan province of southwestern China. Tea grows for two years, and then generally can be harvested at 7-10 day intervals for up to 60 years. Tea plants can grow very tall, but they are typically maintained as shrubs through pruning.

Types of tea 

There are two main varieties of the tea plant: the small-leaved China plant (C. sinensis sinensis) and the large-leaved Assam plant (C. sinensis assamica).

There are six main types of tea: white, yellow, green, ooling, black, and puerh. Each tea type has its own processing methods and brewing times, but a core difference is the extent to which the leaves are fermented.

Technically herbal blends and fruit infusions are not teas, but rather tisanes.

Where is it grown?

The tea plant grows naturally throughout much of Asia, but it can be (and is) grown elsewhere. Tea is grown in more than 45 countries, but the biggest producers are China and India and the biggest exporters are Sri Lanka and Kenya.

India is the second largest tea producer, with more than 1,692 tea manufacturers and approximately 3.5 million tea workers. The tea industry is India’s largest private sector employer. Assam and Darjeeling are the two most well-known teas produced in India. 70% of India’s tea is produced in Assam and West Bengal.

Almost 5% of the population of Sri Lanka works in the tea industry, either on plantations or in tea processing.

A very brief history of tea

Tea has been used since about 2700 B.C.E.

It was first used in China for medicinal purposes. Tea was also a status good and currency in China, used to pay tribute to Chinese emperors. Tea plantations were established by the British East India Company during British colonial rule, which emphasizes “the consistent and resilient role of forced and exploited labour on tea plantations throughout the historical development of the industry”.

The tea production process

First, obviously, you have to grow and harvest the tea. This article has a lot of detail on tea cultivation. Tea is picked and gathered in tarpaulin bags. Pickers pick what is called the “flush” (a grouping of two young leaves and a bud). Pickers often have weight-based quotas on which worker pay is dependent.

Then tea is processed in a series of complex and varied steps. Withering is the first step. Dry air is blown on the leaves to extract moisture. Sometimes leaves are withered in the sun before undergoing indoor withering. Then, a rolling machine twists the withered leaves. This phase can also be called disruption.

Some teas are fermented, while others are not – and this is the main difference between different kinds of tea. Fermentation is where tea is allowed to undergo enzymatic oxidation before it is dried. That process can be stopped by roasting or steaming the leaves. The longer tea is fermented, the darker the colour of the leaves. White teas, as well as some green teas, are either non-fermented or only lightly fermented. Semi-fermented tea leaves have a slight yellow to brown colour. Jasmine and oolong teas are semi-fermented. Black teas are fully fermented. Fermentation time depends on temperature. 

After leaves have sufficiently fermented, they are placed in a tumbling gas-heated dryer, in a process called fixation. Fixation stops fermentation. Next, tea is formed into small pellets by bagging it in cotton and placing the bag in a rolling press. Forming the pellets intensifies the flavour of the tea. Then tea is dried in an oven, where it undergoes three drying cycles of 100 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes each. The aim is to reduce the moisture content to under 5%. Firing also brings out the fragrance of the tea. Next, tea is sorted according to particle size using sieves in a process called grading.

Tea is “exported after primary processing (drying and bulk packaging)”, with blending, final packaging and marketing taking place primarily in buyer countries. These are the most lucrative stages of the process. 86% of the value added happens at the last two stages (tea blending and retailing); only 7% of value added is captured in the producing country.

In the episode, Kristen mentions listening to a cool episode of Stuff You Should Know on how Matcha is made, listen for yourself here!

The tea industry

Tea buying is a highly concentrated industry of a few large companies. Four companies dominate: Unilever (produces Lipton and PG Tips); Tata Tea (produces Tetley); Van Rees (a tea trading company); and James Finlay (a tea packing company). Lack of transparency in the global tea supply chain makes it difficult to trace the origin of blended tea that is sold in western markets. One of the major tea producers is McLeod Russel, which has numerous tea plantations in India, Vietnam, and Uganda.

Tea and the environment

The biggest environmental impact from drinking tea comes from adding milk to it. Drinking tea black can use as little as 21 grams of CO2. But milk will typically account for around two-thirds of the carbon footprint as tea.

A cup of tea has a virtual water footprint of 30 litres of water. That is significantly smaller than the virtual water footprint for coffee (130 litres per cup). Again, though, adding milk is the bulk of the water footprint of a cup of tea. Milk’s virtual water footprint is 255 litres per cup. So if we assume that you add maybe a ¼ cup of milk into a mug of tea, that means the total water footprint of that mug of tea is 94 litres.

Land use

As with other agricultural crops, tea production creates environmental problems through land conversion. Through land conversion for plantations, tea contributes to deforestation, erosion, and river pollution. For example, in North East India a combination of forest and grassland conversion has threatened tiger and rhinoceros habitats.

Tea and human rights

75-85% of tea pickers are women. The biggest ethical concern with tea production is the treatment of workers at tea plantations. In South Asia, these rights violations have their roots in colonialism.

Harvesting tea is labour-intensive, which creates incentives for producers to push down labour costs to increase profit. Even though “global prices for tea are at historically high levels, in real terms […] the prices paid to producers are barely level with, or are even below, where they were 30 years ago.”  

Wages and working conditions 

Tea harvesters make very low wages, often at their country’s minimum wage and below the poverty line. In Sri Lanka, 30% of workers on tea plantations live below the poverty line despite being employed. In India, tea plantation workers can be paid as little as $1-1.5 per day and expected to harvest 20 kilograms of tea or more daily.  

There is also evidence of union busting activity on tea plantations. And pesticide use on tea plantations poses health risks, as workers are often not provided adequate protective equipment. 

Working conditions on tea plantations are, as you can imagine, not great. There has been evidence of violence and abuse, debt bondage, the under-provision of legally mandated goods and services like housing and sanitation, and wage theft. 

Living conditions on tea plantations

Workers are often housed in crowded, barrack-style accommodation. They may have inadequate access to medical care. In the Sri Lankan context, housing was often built by the British during the 1920s (when 20,000 rooms were built for tea-pickers) and have changed little since. Many of these buildings only have electricity or running water for a few hours per day, if at all.

There is very little privacy in these conditions, and workers are at a higher risk of sexual harassment and violence. “A survey conducted on a Sri Lankan plantation discovered that this lack of privacy has led women to commit suicide.” “Alcohol abuse is high among males on plantations and drunken violence against women is common, according to UNICEF.”

In India, at least, these poor living conditions are directly linked to colonialism. The British introduced tea cultivation. Colonial plantations relocated women as indentured laborers in what the British called “tea gardens”. India’s post-independence government sought to address the poor conditions of tea workers, but laws like the Plantation Labour Act 1951 entrenched the colonial plantation system. The Act made plantation owners responsible for providing education, healthcare, sanitation, and employment for workers. This has made workers vulnerable to human rights violations.

And because these houses are often the longstanding family home of tea plantation families, many of these families have more than one family member working on the plantation to ensure that their lodging and employment is secure.

Child and forced labour on tea plantations

Child labour is, unfortunately, not uncommon on tea plantations. Forced labour also occurs in tea production. Notably, in China some tea plantations use penal labour through the laogai system (laogai means reform through labour). 

And the poverty wages on tea plantations can put family at risk of child and forced labour off-plantation. Families often cannot support themselves and their children, which makes their children vulnerable to traffickers. It is not uncommon for girls especially to be trafficked into domestic slavery, where they may suffer physical and sexual abuse. The low wages on tea plantations are connected to forced labour, because they can force families to rely on money lenders and thus enter into situations of debt bondage.

What can you do about it?

Tea plantations can be certified under a number of ethical certification schemes, including Fairtrade; Rainforest Alliance, Ethical Trade Partnership, and Trustea. However, certification does not always guarantee good labour standards. The Global Business of Forced Labour study found that in India in 2018 there was little difference between certified and non-certified plantations on wage levels and other labour standards.

Hired workers on tea plantations in India and Indonesia, at least, are paid the same poverty rate whether they are certified or not: this is because standards only require that wages should not fall below the legal minimum. Therefore, certification is not a guarantee that workers’ wages are living wages.

However, Fairtrade certification does improve wages on smallholder farms. Ethical certification does also help workers on a number of other fronts, such as overtime pay, written contracts, and the investments in healthcare, education, or facility improvements that are made via Fairtrade premiums.

Ethical Tea Partnership

The Ethical Tea Partnership was formed in 1997 by a number of large tea companies, for the purpose of working to monitor and assure tea supply chains. ETP standard is usually seen as less stringent and easier to obtain than Fairtrade tea certification.

Ethical Consumer Brand Ratings

Ethical Consumer’s tea ratings give some sense of the brands with the best ethical commitments, although this rating is very UK-centric. There were slight differences in the ratings of the three big brands, including within the different teas under the same brand name. But all three scored near the bottom of the rating as a result of a report on workers’ rights that addresses tea plantations servicing all of the big brands. The top performers were all Fairtrade, Organic, or both.