Tea (25 page)

Ironically, though, the Chinese themselves are drinking less tea than they ever have before. After thousands of years of revering tea, the Chinese have recently developed a taste for coffee and sodas, and domestic consumption of tea is down—meaning that there is plenty of tea to export. These circumstances have experts throughout the world concerned about a flood of Chinese tea in the world market, a
situation that is particularly worrisome to developing countries that depend heavily on the tea industry. Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka (where
10
percent of the population depends on income generated by the tea industry) are especially vulnerable to competition from China.

THE WORKERS

Tea is a very labor-intensive crop to grow. Although machines are used for picking the leaves at many plantations, almost all of the highest-quality tea is still picked by hand, just as it was in China almost two thousand years ago—meaning that most tea planters still require a large labor force. Women constitute a large part of this work force.

Plucking takes accuracy, as only the top leaves and bud are picked for the finest teas. A good tea plucker must also be fast to fill her daily quota. An experienced plucker performs the picking motion approximately fifty thousand
times a day, and usually harvests at least
54
kilograms (
119
pounds) per day. The leaves are picked with the thumb and fore finger, then tossed into a basket carried on the plucker's back. The basket is the only receptacle for the leaves, meaning that the worker must carry the full weight on her back. The repetitive work is boring, the conditions are often difficult, and the hours are long. Piya Chatterjee, author of
A Time for Tea: Women
,
Labor
,
and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation
, lived on tea plantation in Dooars, India, for several seasons. She writes about women laborers during the
1990
plucking season, who left their homes at
6
:
00
a.m., plucked until
11
:
00
a.m., then walked two miles to a checkpoint, carrying full baskets of leaves that weighed between
30
–
35
kilograms (
66
–
77
pounds). After a short break while the leaves were being weighed and checked, they walked back to the fields for an afternoon of picking.

Even though the work is difficult and the hours are long, those people in India who still have a job in the tea plantations feel fortunate, for many of the plantations have been forced to close, resulting in devastating conditions for workers.

The Indian tea industry has been in crisis for several years, a situation due to a combination of factors. In addition to aging plants and outdated processing machinery, the demand for Indian tea has sharply decreased. For many years, the USSR provided a secure market for Indian tea, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, this ready market disappeared. Another determining factor in the decreasing demand is the liberal globalization policies of the Indian government, which have allowed cheap tea from Kenya and other countries to flood the market. The third major factor is the weather (primarily drought), which has been devastating for the tea plants during the past several years, resulting in decreased productivity. The combination of all these factors has forced many tea plantations to close, at least temporarily, leading to a humanitarian crisis among the tea workers of India, particularly on plantations in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala.

Because tea farms operate under a plantation system, whereby workers are completely dependent on the plantation for housing, food, schooling, medicine, and the like, when a plantation shuts down, there is nowhere for the workers and their families to go. The crisis in this region of
India alone affects over one hundred thousand workers. On the closed and abandoned plantations, workers are now subsisting at below-poverty level. There is dilapidated housing; rampant disease, including AIDS; no medicines; no schooling for young children, and no transportation to school for older children; a critical lack of clean drinking water; and, perhaps most devastating of all, insufficient food. The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF) reported in
2006
that “thousands of workers have starved to death since then [
2001
] despite attempts to get them food aid and other assistance.”

In many cases, the plantation owners have absconded with worker pension funds that have been valued at as much as seventeen months' worth of worker wages. There have been pleas to the Indian government to help in this crisis. The Plantation Labor Act of
1951
established laws protecting the workers, but these have not been enforced. The government has provided some relief, but starvation and a lack of medicine and clean drinking water continue to be critical.

India is not the only country that faces challenges in bringing humanitarian aid and rights to these workers. Some of the gravest issues include child labor, exploitation of women, and the rampant spread of HIV and AIDS. In addition, increased mechanization among the larger tea growers poses the threat of lost jobs. Machines are not as selective or as careful as human hands, but they can pick, at the minimum, twenty times more tea per day than a human worker. The lure of bigger profits is still as appealing to tea plantation owners as in the past.

In all areas where tea is grown, workers and small growers are facing disturbing challenges brought on by globalization and open trading borders. These policies, backed by the World Trade Organization (WTO), bene-fit the big tea brands at the expense of the workers and independent growers. In
2005
, an International Tea Conference composed of tea workers and small growers from eleven tea-producing countries from Africa, South Asia, and East Asia met to draw up specific provisions to protect these groups. This conference declared December
15
,
2005
, and the same day every year thereafter, to be International Tea Day—a time to draw attention to the impact that the tea trade has on laborers, small growers, and consumers.

RESPONSIBLE CONSUMERISM

For Westerners, tea has always suggested refinement, sophistication, and elegance. Today, tea also offers a calming and healthy influence—an antidote for the hectic lives we live. But, as has happened throughout history, the cost to others when we purchase such commodities is much steeper than the price we pay for them. In the case of tea, however, there are ways that consumers can make ethical and responsible purchases—and still buy as much tea as they desire.

The Fair Trade Organization offers a certification program that helps family farmers in developing countries get direct access to international markets and receive fair prices for their products. The goal is to provide for a better life for farmers and workers. Tea is one of the fastest-growing Fair Trade Certification product categories. As of September
2006
, Fair Trade certificates were awarded to seventy tea estates and small-scale producers in eleven countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Most Fair Trade certificate recipients are also certified organic, making their products a good purchase on all accounts, except perhaps financially. As expected, Fair Trade products are generally more expensive than those that are not certified because most Fair Trade–certified producers do not benefit from the same economies of scale as larger companies, and because they offer workers fair wages. For a complete listing of the brands that have received Fair Trade Certification, go to the Transfair Web site at
www.transfairusa.org
.

Another industry watchdog is the Ethical Tea Partnership, which monitors living and working conditions on tea estates to ensure that participating members produce tea in a socially responsible way. Tea estates from eleven different countries are members of this partnership and produce popular brands.

CHINA

China's tea production is legendary—literally. There are rumors and stories of China's sacred gardens, which—for hundreds, if not thousands, of years—produced teas just for the emperor and his court. Today, special teas are grown and produced just for the highest-ranking party officials. No visitors are allowed in these most sacred gardens, and nothing is permitted that might compromise the purity of the tea. Some of the legendary teas produced in such gardens include Pei Hou, a green tea purported to grow in a tea garden only reached by a five-hour trek.

Whether the leaves are picked by virgins in white gloves or by workers toiling in the vast tea gardens in China, this country of tea's origin still produces some of the finest teas in the world. China produces green, white, oolong, and black teas of excellent quality. Black tea is often called “red tea” in China.

Tea is grown in eighteen regions in China. The five main provinces are Zhejiang, Hunan, Szechwan, Fujian, and Anhui. The first crop is picked, or plucked, from mid-April to mid-May and constitutes over
50
percent of the total harvest for the year. A second harvest is done in early summer, and in some regions, a third harvest is done in early autumn.

TAIWAN
(
FORMOSA
)

Taiwan was known as Formosa (a word that means “beautiful”) under Japanese rule and has retained this name to refer to various excellent teas produced on the island. Although it has been claimed that the first tea produced on Taiwan was made from wild plants, in the
1860
s tea was already being cultivated there and became an important export. The first teas produced were oolong, and this remains, today, the primary type of tea exported from Taiwan.