The World Bank's April Commodity Markets Outlook forecasts the average world tea price, the arithmetic mean of the Kolkata, Colombo, and Mombasa auctions, to fall 2.1% in 2026 to $2.85 a kilogram, extending a slide that has now run two years. The bank's own price data show the decline already well underway: the three-auction average dropped to $2.71 a kilogram in the first quarter of 2026, down 8.4% from the fourth quarter of 2025 and below every quarterly reading of the year before.

The three auctions have not moved together. Kolkata fell the hardest, down 22% quarter on quarter to $2.07 a kilogram, a decline the bank attributes mainly to ample Indian supply. Colombo eased a milder 5%, to $3.75 a kilogram. Mombasa held closest to flat, up slightly to $2.30 a kilogram, which the data show holding up better on demand for premium quality and on weather concerns affecting output elsewhere in East Africa.

The 2026 forecast follows a 4.3% drop in the full-year 2025 average, to $2.91 a kilogram from $3.04 in 2024. The bank's forecasters see the slide bottoming out after this year: they project the average price rising 5.3% in 2027, to $3.00 a kilogram. The current 2026 figure is itself a downgrade from the bank's own outlook six months earlier, in October 2025, which had put the year about ten cents a kilogram higher.

Tea's own decline is far milder than the headline number for the World Bank's broader beverages price index, which the same report puts down more than 30% for 2026. That composite is dragged down chiefly by cocoa, whose price the bank forecasts falling by more than half this year after 2025's record run; tea and coffee, moving in the same basket, are each expected to fall by single-digit percentages.

Sources: World Bank, Commodity Markets Outlook, April 2026; World Bank, Pink Sheet commodity price data.