Tagged: india
Who Pays the Tea Tax?
Kenya, Sri Lanka, and India have each taxed a kilogram of tea leaving the country, at different rates, for different reasons, with different results. Here is what each levy actually does, and who really carries it.
Why Doesn't Tea Have a Futures Market?
Coffee has traded futures since 1882 and cocoa since the 1920s. Tea, which outsells them both, has never had one, anywhere. The reason is not price stability. It is that no two lots of tea are the same thing.
Who Bears the Cost of Tea's Climate Adaptation
Irrigation, shade trees, and drought-tolerant cultivars all carry a real bill, and it lands on different people in India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka. Here is what the adaptation money actually buys, and who is short of it.
The World's Biggest Tea Growers Are Not Its Biggest Tea Drinkers
Turkey and Ireland top the per-person tea rankings. China, India, and Kenya, which grow and export almost all of the world's leaf, sit far down the list. The gap is not about taste. It is about how much of a harvest a country keeps for itself.
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.
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.