Tagged: kenya
The Tea Cartel That Worked, and the Farmers It Was Built to Keep Out
In 1933, India, Ceylon, and the Dutch East Indies ran the one tea cartel that ever actually moved the price. The same years, a Kenyan law barred African farmers from growing the crop at all. Both restrictions ended within about a year of each other.
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.
What a Certification Label Pays the Tea Grower
Fairtrade mandates a fixed 50 US cent per kilo premium on tea but only around 4 percent of eligible production is ever sold on those terms. Rainforest Alliance covers far more of the world's tea at a smaller, now-negotiable premium. Kenya's factories tried to opt out entirely in 2025. The figures behind all three.
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.
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.
Tea Has No Nestle
Coffee has Nestle and JAB. Tea has no equivalent. Here is who actually moves the world's leaf, from a Kenyan cooperative managing 600,000 farmers to a private-equity-owned spinout carrying billions in debt, and why no one has consolidated the trade the way coffee's owners have.
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.
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.
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.
Climate and the Tea Supply
The canonical reference on how a warming, less predictable climate reaches the tea trade. The plant's physiological limits, the two shapes exposure takes, why a weather shock does not move the price the way it looks like it should, the three adaptation levers and who pays for each, and the pest and insurance gaps still mostly unclosed.
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.
KTDA, the Company That Runs Kenya's Smallholder Tea
One management company runs the factories that process tea for roughly 600,000 Kenyan smallholders, pays them on a two-tier system split between a monthly rate and a year-end bonus, and answers to no single owner. Here is how it is built, how the money moves, and where the fights over it keep breaking out.
Trade and Tariffs
What a tea shipment actually pays to cross a border, in three layers that rarely move together: the import tariff, the exporting country's own levy, and a growing set of non-tariff rules that now do more to stop a shipment than either tax does.
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.