Companies & Labour
Georgia Was the World's Fourth-Largest Tea Exporter. Then It Lost 99 Percent of the Crop.
Soviet Georgia supplied nearly all the USSR's tea and ranked among the world's top tea exporters. After 1991 the industry lost almost all of it, and the revival since has recovered only a small fraction of the peak.
The Arithmetic of a Garden Closure
A tea garden does not close on one bad season. It closes when the cost of producing a kilo of tea sits above what the auction will pay for long enough that debt outruns the harvest, and the numbers behind that threshold, from Assam's slow squeeze to Darjeeling's shuttered gates, are public.
What a Certification Label Pays the Tea Grower
Fairtrade mandates a fixed 50 US cent per kilo premium on tea but only around 4 percent of eligible production is ever sold on those terms. Rainforest Alliance covers far more of the world's tea at a smaller, now-negotiable premium. Kenya's factories tried to opt out entirely in 2025. The figures behind all three.
What a Tea Garden Worker Earns
Three producing countries pay tea labour on three different systems, a daily wage plus quota, a daily wage plus a government top-up, and a straight price per kilo. Here is what each one actually pays, and the one case where a wage rise cost more jobs than it raised.
Tea Has No Nestle
Coffee has Nestle and JAB. Tea has no equivalent. Here is who actually moves the world's leaf, from a Kenyan cooperative managing 600,000 farmers to a private-equity-owned spinout carrying billions in debt, and why no one has consolidated the trade the way coffee's owners have.
Why Kenya's Tea Factories Never Consolidated
Kenya split its tea sector into roughly 70 small, farmer-owned factories and never merged them, even as Assam's estates consolidated under debt and Sri Lanka's state gardens were carved into fewer corporate players. The reasons are structural, legal, and, once, deliberately blocked at a shareholder vote.