Tagged: sri lanka
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 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.
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.
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.
A Longer Breeding Season Is Raising Tea's Pest Bill
India's Tea Research Association puts pest damage at 147 million kilograms of tea a year, about $318 million, and researchers now tie the rising toll to longer summers and shorter winters. Here is the mechanism, the regional split, and what growers are trying instead of more spray.
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.
Kenya's Tea Farmers Took Home Less in a Year the Shilling Got Stronger
A tea garden is paid in its own currency for a crop sold against the US dollar, so the exchange rate can move a season's income more than the harvest does. Kenya and India lived through opposite versions of that mechanism in the same year.
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.