Tagged: geographical indication
Darjeeling's Priciest Tea Isn't Its Biggest Earner
A handful of spring-plucked Darjeeling lots sell for the price of silver, but the season's real income comes two months later, from a flush that never makes the headlines.
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 grow about half its leaf.
Darjeeling's Tea Economy
Darjeeling's tea output has roughly halved in a decade and roughly half its 87 gardens have been reported as ready for sale, while the name itself has been registered abroad and placed under compulsory licensing at home.
Geographical Indications in Tea
What a geographical indication legally is, how it differs from a trademark and a certification mark, what the WTO treaty behind it actually obliges, which tea names are registered where, and what the empirical literature says the premium is worth.
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 sector now growing about half of Assam's leaf, 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.
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 Board of India
The statutory body that licenses every tea garden in the country, forces half the crop through public auction, and owns the Darjeeling name outright. It was built on a cess that no longer exists.