Tagged: estates

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.

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.