Tagged: smallholder factories

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.

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.