The world grows something on the order of six to seven million tonnes of tea a year, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's reckoning, on plantations in more than two dozen countries. A handful of them account for the great majority of it, and the way they grow it (on large estates, or on tens of thousands of small farms) shapes the price, the quality, and who the money reaches. This is the reference on the producing side of the trade: who grows the tea, how, and on what terms. The market it feeds is set out in The Auctions, and the chain from there to the cup in How the Trade Works.

The big producers

Production is concentrated. By the FAO's figures, two countries grow most of the world's tea:

• China is by far the largest producer, growing close to half of all the world's tea. Most of it is green tea, and most of it is drunk inside China.
• India is the second-largest, at roughly a fifth of world output, led by Assam and the southern hill states, with Darjeeling as its small, famous prestige crop. Between them, China and India grow more than two-thirds of the world's tea.
• Kenya is the third-largest producer and the engine of the African crop.
• Sri Lanka, whose tea is sold as Ceylon, is the other classic exporter of note.

Below these sit Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, Argentina, and a long tail of smaller producers. The shares move slowly from year to year, but the shape is stable: a Chinese and Indian core, a powerful African exporter in Kenya, and Sri Lanka as the storied fourth.

Two ways to grow it: estates and smallholders

Tea is grown under two very different models, and the difference is central to its economics.

• Estates are large plantations with their own factories, a resident workforce, and a single owner or company. This is the classic plantation model of Assam, Darjeeling, and the Sri Lankan highlands: tea grown, plucked, and made at scale on one holding.
• Smallholders are small farmers who grow tea on a few acres and sell their green leaf to a nearby "bought-leaf" factory that does the processing. Kenya is the model case: around sixty percent of Kenya's tea comes from smallholders, organised into cooperatives under the Kenya Tea Development Agency, the world's largest smallholder tea organisation, which collects leaf from more than half a million registered farmers and processes it in dozens of factories.

The model matters because it decides who bears the risk and who captures the margin. An estate carries its own costs and keeps its own factory revenue; a smallholder takes a price for raw leaf and is exposed to every swing in the auction without the cushion of scale.

Grown in one place, drunk in another

The largest producer is not the largest exporter, and the distinction is the key to the trade. China grows the most tea but consumes most of it at home, so relatively little reaches the world market. Kenya, by contrast, is the world's largest exporter of black tea, selling almost all of its crop abroad. So the country that sets the tone of the international black-tea market is not the one that grows the most tea overall, but the one that exports the most of the kind the world trades. Read any global tea price and you are largely reading Kenyan and other African CTC, sold through Mombasa.

What they grow: CTC and orthodox

Producing countries also differ in how they make their tea, and the choice sorts them into different markets. CTC (crush, tear, curl) makes the hard granular black tea that fills tea bags, and it dominates production in India and Kenya: fast, cheap, consistent, and sold by the tonne into mass blends. Orthodox manufacture keeps the leaf whole, takes longer, and yields the graded loose-leaf teas (and the prestige origins) that fetch higher prices. A country's mix of the two, and the origins it is known for, sets what its crop is worth on the world market.

Who it lands on

The people who grow and pluck the tea receive a small and often volatile share of its final price. The Fairtrade Foundation reports that tea growers earn only a fraction of what tea fetches in the shops of Europe and the United States, that smallholders who produce much of the crop in Kenya and Sri Lanka face low and fluctuating prices, and that wages on tea plantations sit around national legal minimums and rarely amount to a living wage. This is the structural fact under all the others: tea is cheap because the cost of growing it is low, and the cost of growing it is low in part because the return to the grower and the picker is low. A publication that reports the market honestly has to report that too.

The bottom line

The world's tea comes mostly from China and India, with Kenya as the export powerhouse and Sri Lanka as the classic fourth, grown on a mix of large estates and a vast number of smallholdings. The largest grower keeps its crop at home; the largest exporter sets the world price; and the people nearest the bush keep the least of what the leaf earns. Hold those three facts together and the rest of the tea economy, the auctions, the blends, the brands on the shelf, reads as what happens to the leaf after it leaves the hands that grew it.