Guides
Assam's Tea Economy
Assam alone grows more tea than any country except China and India itself, over half of India's total, out of three ownership models sharing one valley: private estates, a shrinking state corporation, and small growers who now supply more leaf than either.
Tea Certification
What a Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, organic, or trustea seal actually verifies, how the audit behind each one works, and why a certified box of tea does not always mean every leaf inside is traceable to one certified garden.
China's Tea Industry
China grows more tea than any other country by a wide margin and drinks nearly all of it itself, the reverse of the plantation-export model that built India's, Kenya's, and Sri Lanka's crops. How a single state trading monopoly gave way to more than a million small growers with no majority brand, why the country runs on wholesale markets instead of public auctions, and why its fastest-growing tea business now sells the leaf as a drink rather than a commodity.
Climate and the Tea Supply
The canonical reference on how a warming, less predictable climate reaches the tea trade. The plant's physiological limits, the two shapes exposure takes, why a weather shock does not move the price the way it looks like it should, the three adaptation levers and who pays for each, and the pest and insurance gaps still mostly unclosed.
How Black Tea Is Made: CTC and Orthodox
The canonical reference on the two ways black tea is manufactured, crush-tear-curl and orthodox, and why that one factory decision has sorted the world's tea economies into different positions in the market.
How the Tea Trade Works
The canonical map of the tea business, from garden to auction to shelf. What tea is as a commodity, the path the leaf takes to the cup, how its price is set, and where the money along the way actually ends up.
India's Tea Industry
The world's second-largest tea producer is also its largest tea-drinking nation, and the two facts explain most of the rest. How a colonial plantation crop became four distinct growing regions, a smallholder majority the estates did not see coming, an auction system half its own producers now want to escape, and a trade caught between a record export year and three separate fights over access.
KTDA, the Company That Runs Kenya's Smallholder Tea
One management company runs the factories that process tea for roughly 600,000 Kenyan smallholders, pays them on a two-tier system split between a monthly rate and a year-end bonus, and answers to no single owner. Here is how it is built, how the money moves, and where the fights over it keep breaking out.
Labour in the Tea Gardens
Tea is one of the most labour-intensive crops on earth, and no single system pays for that labour. A resident estate wage paid partly in housing and rations, a smallholder's price per kilogram of leaf, and a hired picker paid by neither company nor law. Where each system came from, what a 1951 law and a 1958 international standard tried to fix, and where the audits still do not reach.
Sri Lanka's Tea Economy
The canonical reference on Ceylon tea as an industry. How coffee's collapse created it, how nationalisation and then privatisation reshaped who owns it, the elevation bands that set what it tastes like, the brand mark that protects its name, and the shocks, agrochemical and otherwise, that keep testing it.
The Tea Auctions
How tea is priced and sold. The canonical reference on the world's tea auctions: how a sale actually works, the major centres at Mombasa, Colombo, and across India, the move from the outcry floor to the screen, and what an auction price really means.
The Companies of Tea
Who actually owns the tea industry, in four models: the colonial-rooted plantation company, the farmer-owned cooperative federation, the state-linked enterprise, and the family holding group or global blender. What each looks like, where each dominates, and why the model determines who absorbs a bad harvest.
The Price of Tea
The canonical reference on what sets a tea's price. What fixes it at the point of sale, why the real-terms trend has run downhill for a century, where the money goes once the leaf clears the gate, what moves it between sales, and what a certification label actually adds.
Trade and Tariffs
What a tea shipment actually pays to cross a border, in three layers that rarely move together: the import tariff, the exporting country's own levy, and a growing set of non-tariff rules that now do more to stop a shipment than either tax does.
Who Grows the World's Tea
The producing economies of tea. The canonical reference on where tea comes from: the big producing countries, the split between estates and smallholders, why the largest grower is not the largest exporter, and the small share of the price that reaches the people who grow it.