Tagged: tea production
How El Nino and La Nina Split the Tea Harvest
The same El Nino can put record volumes of tea on the ground in Kenya while raising drought risk in Sri Lanka, in the same months. What the ENSO cycle actually does to the harvest, region by region, and why a real statistical link to it still will not forecast a season.
China's Tea Industry
China grows more tea than any other country by a wide margin and drinks nearly all of it itself, the reverse of the plantation-export model that built India's, Kenya's, and Sri Lanka's crops. How a single state trading monopoly gave way to more than a million small growers with no majority brand, why the country runs on wholesale markets instead of public auctions, and why its fastest-growing tea business now sells the leaf as a drink rather than a commodity.
Sri Lanka's Tea Economy
The canonical reference on Ceylon tea as an industry. How coffee's collapse created it, how nationalisation and then privatisation reshaped who owns it, the elevation bands that set what it tastes like, the brand mark that protects its name, and the shocks, agrochemical and otherwise, that keep testing it.
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.