International Tea Day – the 15th of December – Since 2004

After water, tea is the most popular drink in the world with 15,000 cups drunk per second.

The next time you are sipping a hot cup of tea, you may not want to understand the conditions faced by people involved behind the growing and plucking of it.

Over 1 million persons are directly employed in India. Women constitute nearly 51% of the total workforce.

Before the last two years, market prices for tea had dropped markedly over the past five years. Faced with global oversupply of tea, producers in many regions were selling much of their product at below the cost of production.

While the wholesale prices have been more or less stuck in the $2 to $2.20 range since the 1990s, costs of production and transportation – labour, diesel, equipment – have risen by far more.

In this context of low market prices, the labour conditions of tea workers in plantations are also deteriorating. The plight of tea plantation workers is a well known issue in many producing countries like India, Sri Lanka and Kenya.

Plantation workers often earn pitiful living, below legal minimum wages. They are heavily dependent on estate owners for most of their basic needs, such as healthcare, housing, primary education for their children and water access. In an attempt to cut costs basic needs are often not properly met, leaving workers and their children little alternative but to continue the cycle of dependency and vulnerability.

But, the wholesale price of a kilo of tea has doubled in a couple of years, to a peak of about $4 a kilo. Why?

The short answer is that supply has fallen and demand has risen. In three of the main tea-producing countries of the world, political disturbance and poor weather have conspired to restrict supply.

Tea's troubles began in Kenya with the election crisis and violence of last year and 2007. That displaced the tea plantation workers, disrupted supply generally and disabled Mombasa as a major centre of trading and export for the whole of east Africa,

Meanwhile, a drought in India has caused mayhem in the production of virtually all her staple and cash crops, including sugar, rice and wheat, and tea. Late monsoons have hit west Bengal and Assam particularly badly. Separatist activity and a strike have also exacerbated the problem in Darjeeling in India, knocking production back by 20 per cent in the state. In Sri Lanka a serious frost on higher ground has also inflicted damage on the crop, even as the political situation there has eased.

But these are but short term movements - “the only long-term, sustainable solution is for estates to give workers a stake in the earnings.”