Who Grows the World's Tea

The world grows something on the order of seven million tonnes of tea a year (about 7.7 million US tons), 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 just over half of all the world's tea, per the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal's 2025 tally. 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 three-quarters 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 Türkiye, which the same 2025 tally now ranks ahead of Sri Lanka, then Vietnam, Indonesia, 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 trade's storied name for Ceylon.

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, one of the world's largest smallholder tea organisations, 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. India and Kenya run mostly CTC, the granular black tea that fills the world's tea bags; orthodox manufacture keeps the leaf whole for the higher-priced loose-leaf and prestige grades. A country's mix of the two, and the origins it is known for, sets what its crop is worth. The two methods, and why they command different prices, are set out in full in CTC and Orthodox.

Who it lands on

The people who grow and pluck the tea keep a small and often volatile share of its final price: growers earn only a fraction of what tea fetches on a Western shelf, and plantation wages sit near the legal minimum rather than a living wage. That is the structural fact under all the others. Tea is cheap partly because the return to the grower and the picker is low, which is why the estate-and-smallholder split above decides so much of who the money reaches. What that share looks like as a wage, country by country, is set out in What a Tea Garden Worker Earns.

Grown here, exported there

The world's tea comes mostly from China and India, with Kenya as the export powerhouse and Sri Lanka the trade's classic name for Ceylon, 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.