Tagged: smallholders
Why Is Tea So Cheap?
Tea's auction price has gone nowhere for 20 years and now sits below what was paid a century ago, in real terms. Here is what the figures say is actually happening, and who is absorbing the squeeze.
The Companies of Tea
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 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.
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.