Tagged: assam
Where a Warming Climate Is Already Cutting Tea Yields
A peer-reviewed synthesis of decades of research puts real numbers on climate change's effect on tea yield and quality, and on the growing area itself. Here is what the figures say, region by region.
Who Makes Money From a Cup of Tea?
A 2019 field study traced a kilogram of Assam tea through five pairs of hands and found the factory keeps the largest cut, ahead of the farm. A 2021 study of Vietnam's Thai Nguyen chain found close to the opposite. The arithmetic behind both.
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.
Why a Drought Doesn't Always Raise the Tea Price
Two Kenyan droughts, a dry Assam monsoon, and a Sri Lankan cyclone give four real, recent tests of what a weather shock does to the tea price. The answer is not the simple shortage story it looks like from outside.
A Tea's Grade Is a Size Code, Not a Quality Score
A tea's grade, OP, BOP, PD, Dust, is a sorting code, not a quality score, and it is the single biggest reason two kilos of tea from the same garden sell for very different prices at auction.
A Longer Breeding Season Is Raising Tea's Pest Bill
India's Tea Research Association puts pest damage at 147 million kilograms of tea a year, about $318 million, and researchers now tie the rising toll to longer summers and shorter winters. Here is the mechanism, the regional split, and what growers are trying instead of more spray.
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.
Weather Insurance for Tea Only Arrived in 2025
India's government wrote tea into a weather-based insurance scheme for the first time in 2025. Sri Lanka's smaller pilot dates to 2012 and stayed small. Kenya, the top exporter, still has no scheme built around the crop at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.