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Trigger warning: This article contains references to sexual violence in the Blood Tea and What About Fairtrade? sections below.
Much has been made about the calming, healing qualities of tea. “The path to Heaven passes through a teapot,” says one ancient proverb. “Drinking a daily cup of tea will surely starve the apothecary,” says another. Lo Tung, a Chinese poet who devoted his life to the study of tea, wrote, “When I drink tea I am conscious of peace. The cool breath of heaven rises in my sleeves, and blows my cares away.” More recently, the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh advised: “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.” And according to the Japanese Buddhist priest Myōan Eisai, “Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one’s life more full and complete.”
Pretty heady stuff, especially for a humble beverage. By the time Eisai wrote his book Kissayojoki (“Health Care by Drinking Tea”) in 1211, tea had been enjoyed for nearly 4,000 years. The true history of drinking tea is muddled, but it likely has its roots in China. The most well-known account is that Emperor Shen Nung (sometimes spelled Shennong) accidentally discovered the brew in 2732 or 2737 BCE when a few leaves from a wild tea tree wafted into his pot of boiling water. (An enormous figure in Chinese culture, Shen Nung has also been credited with the creation of such agricultural advances as the axe, the hoe, irrigation, and even the weekly farmer’s market.[1])
The tea plant is thought to be native to a belt of land extending eastward from upper Assam (in India) across northern Burma and Thailand, and into southwest China.[2] The plant is usually described as having split some 22,000 years ago into two distinct types: the Chinese variety (Camellia sinensis var. sinensis) and the Assam or Indian variety (Camellia sinensis var. assamica). Assam tea leaves are larger than their Chinese counterpart.[3]
Today tea, whether sipped piping hot or over ice, is the second most widely consumed drink in the world—surpassed in popularity only by water—and it’s found in countless beverages from cocktails to kombucha. It also has dozens of other surprising uses, including glass cleaner, hair washer, fabric dye, shoe deodorizer, insect bite reliever, and garden fertilizer.
According to the latest available data, global tea production amounted to about 6.1 million metric tons in 2019,[4] with China, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and India being the four largest producers.[5] And while drinking tea is certainly a popular tradition in both China and England, the biggest consumer of tea is actually Türkiye (formerly known as Turkey), followed by Ireland.[6]
Trouble Brewing
There are a number of social justice issues surrounding tea, however, from unethical labor practices to the impact the crop’s production can have on the environment. As with other foods, including avocados, chocolate, and bananas, such concerns encourage conscientious consumers to closely evaluate products and their purchasing options.
“Tea is intimately connected with power,” writes Bengt G. Karlsson, professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University. “The plant Camellia sinensis has during the last three centuries been the cause of imperial wars, colonial expansions, scientific explorations, nation-state building projects and corporate exploitations of people and environments around the world.”[7]
As Professor Karlsson observes, the trouble with tea goes back hundreds of years, when British colonizers were exploiting the people and land of South Asia, which offers an ideal climate for growing tea. Britain is one of the largest consumers of tea—some 100 million cups per day, which is about 36 billion cups per year[8]—and in the pursuit of satisfying this demand England- and Scotland-based tea companies established plantations in India and the island nation of Sri Lanka, both of which had been subjugated as colonies of the crown (and would remain so until the 1940s).
Prior to the 19th century, England and Scotland imported their tea from China. That changed drastically when the British began cultivating tea in Sri Lanka using plants stolen from China and when they discovered there were wild tea plants growing in the northeast Indian state of Assam.[9] [10] In 1867, James Taylor, from Scotland, established the first tea plantation in Sri Lanka,[11] and by 1890 he was partners with fellow Scotsman Thomas Lipton, whose name would become synonymous with one of the biggest brands in the industry.[12]
Tea plantations thrived during this period, and plantation owners sought the cheapest labor they could find. Slavery had been banned throughout the British Empire in 1833, so the industry used indentured laborers—men and women who signed contracts binding them to work for a certain period—in both India and Sri Lanka (which at the time the colonizers called Ceylon). Managers of tea plantations (also known as “tea gardens”) frequently used deceptive methods to lure workers. One ploy was to send well-dressed female agents to spend several days in a village and socialize with the locals. The agents would tell women, “Look, I have earned lots of money by working in X tea garden. The job is nothing. Come with me. I will lead you to a prosperous life.”[13]
Once the workers arrived at the plantation, they had to work from sunrise to sunset. Each morning, all laborers lined up for a head count, and anyone who was found to be absent was reported to the police. Because of how their debt bondage contracts were written, the workers gave up all civil rights as independent members of society when they registered as tea laborers. The wages they earned were miserly, barely sufficient to pay for bread, so they were not able to afford transportation home. Moreover, many British managers introduced currency specifically for trading in plantation areas and even banned public transport from the tea plantations. All this served to isolate the workforce and keep them bound to the plantation.[14]
According to researcher K. Ravi Raman, “The distinction drawn between slavery and the actual conditions of work that existed on plantations was so subtle as to escape the comprehension of the harassed workers—so intensive and painful was the ill-treatment meted out to them.”[15] Exploitation of workers, which also included violent labor discipline, resulted in low birth rates and high mortality rates among tea pickers.[16]
Blood Tea
Indentured servitude is still common today, with laborers’ sons and daughters often inheriting their debt and continuing their parents’ work on the plantation.[17] Research into the modern tea industry has found that employers have created ways to produce even further debt bondage. Although they are legally required to provide medical care, for example, employers withhold this service and then charge high interest when workers borrow money from them to pay for it—and for food.[18]
A detailed investigation in 2018 uncovered a variety of human rights abuses in India’s tea industry, including physical violence, sexual violence, verbal abuse, and threats of violence and dismissal. One tea worker told investigators, “I am working as a bonded laborer like a slave. … Other people are being paid satisfactorily in other sectors but here we are not paid much, and the work is very painful.” Another said, “The management do not treat the workers as humans.” And another worker described male managers trying to rape female workers and explained that the workers “keep going through such kind of humiliation with the management” and noted that “most of the workers along with me are doing it forcefully and out of coercion.”[19]
India gained independence from Britain in 1947, and its tea industry is regulated in part by the 1951 Plantation Labour Act (PLA), which requires employers to safeguard the welfare of permanent tea workers and their families. Employers must provide drinking water, medical facilities, latrines, housing accommodation, child day care, and annual leave with wages and sickness and maternity benefits, for example. The PLA also prohibits child labor and mandates that costs associated with housing, medical, and electricity cannot be included as part of minimum wage. But studies suggest that more and more tea plantations are hiring casual workers, who are not covered by the Act.[20]
Colonization has left a legacy of tea-infused injustice in other parts of the world as well. The east African nation of Kenya was a British colony from 1895 until its independence in 1963, and beginning in the early years of the 20th century, the British army violently evicted members of the Kipsigis and Talai communities from their ancestral land in Kericho County to make way for lucrative tea plantations owned by white European settlers.[21] The United Nations has said that more than half a million Kenyans from the Kericho area suffered gross violations of human rights, including murder and displacement, during British colonial rule.[22]
Members of the Kipsigis and Talai clans are now urging the British government to open an investigation into the crimes that they and their ancestors suffered—and to apologize. “The victims are still there and there are offsprings to these victims and we are in a situation where sufferings are still being felt for atrocities that were committed decades ago, and we are saying that we should bring this to a closure,” said Paul Chepkwony, the Kericho County governor, in 2019. “Those that were removed from Kericho were sent to a place called Gwassi. A very hostile environment which is not habitable for human beings. As a matter of fact, the Kenya government have declared it a national park. It is a place that is only suitable for wild animals because of the high presence of lions, reptiles, crocodiles and insects that cause tropical diseases—these people were confined to the native reserves to pave way for European highlands.”[23]
Although Britain’s main argument has been that it is unfair to hear these cases so long after the events because it is difficult to access the relevant evidence from the time, one of the clans’ attorneys, Rodney Dixon, maintains that reasoning does not carry any weight. “We have women who were raped, victims who were tortured, detained and ejected from their lands who can give direct, first-hand accounts,” he said. “We have documents from the time. This evidence can all be reviewed and tested, so there is no unfairness to any party, and addressing these cases would clearly serve the interests of justice.”[24]
The tea industry is the second-largest employer in Malawi, another east African country, where some 60,000 people work in the sector.[25] It was the British, again, who dominated the industry here, after gradually taking control of the nation in the 1880s and ’90s and finding conditions that were ideal for growing tea. Although Malawi gained independence in 1964, many tea plantations are still run by British companies. In 2021, women workers in Malawi filed a lawsuit against the Lujeri Tea Estate and its British owner, PGI Group, in London’s High Court for sexual abuse that took place between 2014 and 2019. The suit names 36 alleged male perpetrators and lists 22 instances of sexual harassment, 13 instances of sexual assault, 11 instances of coerced sexual relations, and 10 instances of rape.[26] Lujeri supplies tea to many of Great Britain’s largest brands, including PG Tips, Tetley, and Lipton.
Journalists in Malawi reported several firsthand accounts of abuse in other tea plantations owned either wholly or partially by British conglomerates. One woman at the Limbuli Tea Estate said she was fired after she refused to sleep with her supervisor, who told her that there was another manager looking to sexually abuse her and that she could not be protected if she refused. “He promised to protect me from any ills from his fellow manager if I accepted his love proposal,” she said. “I also said no.” Another woman at Limbuli complained that she has been subjected to various abuses because she refused her manager’s sexual advances. The manager fired her, but upper management intervened. “He had been promising to promote me to a supervisor position in the tea testing room if I accept his love proposal,” she said. “I said no, for I am a married woman.” She also said that her husband was fired as a clerk at the same tea plantation because the manager suspected that the husband encouraged his wife to report the sexual abuse attempts to management.[27]
What About Fairtrade?
In 2018, the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) at the University of Sheffield in England published a study on labor in the tea industry in India that included plantations certified by Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, Ethical Trade Partnership, and Trustea. These schemes supposedly set standards around fair treatment, basic services, wages and debt, health and safety, and workers’ rights; consequently, ethical certification organizations often give consumers the impression that by buying certified products, their purchasing choices are not contributing to labor exploitation.
“However, we found that these standards are routinely violated by employers,” writes the report’s author, Genevieve LeBaron, a professor of politics and co-director of SPERI. “Overall, we found that certification had little to no impact on labour standards within the tea industry. Some of the worst cases of exploitation documented within our research occurred on ethically certified plantations.”[28]
Professor LeBaron, who spent two years studying the tea and cocoa industries and their supply chains, adds that workers said that they are instructed to alter their working practices (e.g., in relation to safety equipment) to meet standards during annual audits by certifiers but are then asked to revert to breaking standards the following day, suggesting that producers are cheating audits and inspections. “When interviewed about these gaps and challenges, certifiers repeatedly claimed that their standards do not provide a guarantee that they are being met. According to one certifier, ‘there is no guarantee. We don’t use the word guarantee.’ In this light, the way ethical certification schemes are portrayed to consumers needs to be revisited.”[29]
Elaborating on her research into the tea industry, Professor LeBaron writes, “Workers on tea plantations live on the plantation and depend on their employers for food, medical care, water, housing and sanitation, which employers are legally obligated to provide. Yet, we found that businesses are systematically seeking to increase profits by depriving workers of basic necessities: 47 per cent of tea workers in our study had no access to potable water and 26 per cent did not have access to a toilet. A smaller number of workers reported having also experienced physical and sexual violence at the hands of their employers.” And she concludes that “In the tea industry, on almost every indicator we used to measure labour standards, certified plantations fared about the same, if not worse, as non-certified plantations. For instance, 17 per cent of tea workers on certified plantations have had their benefits withheld by management, compared to 12 per cent of tea workers on non-certified plantations. Some of the most serious instances of physical and verbal abuse reported to us by workers happened on ethically certified plantations. In short, our study found that ethical certification definitely does not guarantee worksites that are free from labour abuse and exploitation.”[30]
Environmental Concerns
In addition to all the labor needed to produce tea, the crop requires vast amounts of land—and as the demand for tea expands, its impact on the land grows with it. One result has been that natural habitats, which are rich in biodiversity, are being converted into enormous swaths of tea plant monocultures. This habitat loss diminishes the number of species and threatens the survival of entire ecosystems.[31] For example, it has been reported that the number of both the lion-tailed macaque in India and the Horton Plains slender loris in Sri Lanka, both of which are on the IUCN’s Red List of endangered species, declined due to tea production.[32]
Still, some species thrive in tea plantations: namely a number of insects, who find ideal conditions in the monoculture environment. To combat them, many growers use large quantities of chemical pesticides and herbicides, which are dispersed by fossil fuel-driven power sprayers and are harmful to humans, harmful to the surrounding soil and waterways, and harmful to beneficial predators. Moreover, most tea plantations in the Global South do not possess effluent treatment plants, so after every manufacture of tea, the contaminated water is simply discarded. The effluents are rich in biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, lignin, and theaflavins, among other waste, and all of them are hazardous to the environment.[33]
The simple act of using electricity to boil water to prepare tea turns out to be one of the highest energy consuming activities affecting the carbon footprint of tea, representing some 70% of the total impact. Energy is wasted at many different stages, including the point of electricity generation, grid losses along the wires, transformer losses as voltage is stepped up and down, and finally through heating water in kettles. All these account for the increase in carbon footprints and the consequential environmental impact of tea.[34]
Yet another detrimental effect is that tea-driven deforestation results in the shrinking of leaf litter on soil, which in turn causes a reduction of organic matter content within the soil and the subsequent hampering of the soil’s water-holding capacity. During heavy rainfall, soil is thus subjected to erosion, followed by siltation of riverbeds and adjacent drains, which ultimately threatens irrigation schemes.[35]
Finally, we can’t overlook tea bags. Invented in the early 20th century, tea bags make both the serving and cleanup of tea easier and became popular in the 1970s alongside other convenience foods such as TV dinners and instant potatoes.[36] Unfortunately, many tea bags are made from plastic, and most tea is enjoyed from these convenient bags. Moreover, some luxury tea brands make their bags using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or nylon, and studies have shown that when steeped in hot water, the tea bags released microplastic and even smaller nanoplastic particles into the brew.[37] The good news is that there is a growing movement among tea companies to remove plastic from tea bags—making them truly biodegradable—and anti-plastic campaigners have been appealing to consumers to use loose tea or greener options such as Japanese-style “pyramids” made of 100% compostable corn starch.[38]
Recommendations
This is an issue we are still learning about, and thus our recommendations may evolve over time. If you enjoy consuming tea, here is what we do and don’t recommend:
- Based on what we know, no matter what certifications exist, we don’t feel comfortable recommending tea from India.
- Loose leaf tea is better for the environment, as single-use tea bags often contain plastic as well as using string and metal staples.
- If you do use tea bags, try to use those made from 100% compostable materials.
- Try to buy and consume organic teas, which are generally produced without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/shennong
[2] Andrew B. Liu, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Yale University Press, 2020), p. 26
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001671852100213X
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264183/global-production-and-exports-of-tea-since-2004/
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264189/main-export-countries-for-tea-worldwide/
[6] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/top-10-tea-loving-countries-in-the-world.html
[7] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001671852100213X
[8] https://www.tea.co.uk/tea-faqs
[9] https://www.aisls.org/resources/teaching-about-sri-lanka/teaching-about-tea/world-history-of-tea/
[10] http://www.almarteas.com/tea_history.html
[11] https://theculturetrip.com/asia/sri-lanka/articles/a-brief-history-of-ceylon-tea-from-lipton-to-teaeli/
[12] https://www.historyofceylontea.com/ceylon-publications/ceylon-tea-articles/sri-lanka-on-the-trail-of-sir-thomas-lipton.html
[13] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211021567
[14] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211021567
[15] K. Ravi Raman, Bondage in Freedom: Colonial Plantations in Southern India c. 1797–1947, Centre for Development Studies Thiruvananthapuram, March 2002, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/19918628.pdf
[16] Genevieve LeBaron, The Global Business of Forced Labour: Report of Findings, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, May 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325472644_The_Global_Business_of_Forced_Labour_Report_of_Findings
[17] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211021567
[18] Genevieve LeBaron, The Global Business of Forced Labour: Report of Findings, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, May 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325472644_The_Global_Business_of_Forced_Labour_Report_of_Findings
[19] Genevieve LeBaron, The Global Business of Forced Labour: Report of Findings, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, May 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325472644_The_Global_Business_of_Forced_Labour_Report_of_Findings
[20] Deepak K. Mishra, et al., “Invisible chains? Crisis in the tea industry and the ‘unfreedom’ of labour in Assam’s tea plantations,” Contemporary South Asia, March 30, 2011, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09584935.2010.549557
[21] https://www.lemkininstitute.com/single-post/how-british-colonizers-brutally-evicted-these-kenyans-from-their-ancestral-land-to-cultivate-tea
[22] https://www.dw.com/en/kenyans-sue-uk-government-for-colonial-land-theft/a-62904224
[23] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/sep/12/kenyans-who-claim-british-army-drove-them-from-their-land-seek-united-nations-inquiry
[24] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/02/kenyas-dispossessed-seek-redress-for-britains-colonial-injustices
[25] https://times.mw/ridding-the-tea-sector-of-child-labour/
[26] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/malawi-women-claim-systemic-sex-abuse-on-tea-plantations-owned-by-british-brand-suppliers/
[27] https://malawi24.com/2022/01/18/sexual-abuse-of-female-workers-rampant-in-estates-in-malawi/
[28] Genevieve LeBaron, The Global Business of Forced Labour: Report of Findings, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, May 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325472644_The_Global_Business_of_Forced_Labour_Report_of_Findings
[29] Genevieve LeBaron, The Global Business of Forced Labour: Report of Findings, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, May 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325472644_The_Global_Business_of_Forced_Labour_Report_of_Findings
[30] https://delta87.org/2018/10/ethical-certification-doesnt-eradicate-forced-labour/
[31] https://theecologist.org/2011/apr/13/environmental-damage-and-human-rights-abuses-blight-global-tea-sector
[32] Thushari Lakmini Wijeratne, “Assessing and reducing the environmental impact of tea cultivation,” from Global Tea Science: Current Status and Future Needs, edited by Dr V. S. Sharma (Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing, 2018), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323353887_Assessing_and_reducing_the_environmental_impact_of_tea_cultivation
[33] https://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-373#acrefore-9780199389414-e-373-div1-9
[34] Thushari Lakmini Wijeratne, “Assessing and reducing the environmental impact of tea cultivation,” from Global Tea Science: Current Status and Future Needs, edited by Dr V. S. Sharma (Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing, 2018), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323353887_Assessing_and_reducing_the_environmental_impact_of_tea_cultivation
[35] https://oxfordre.com/environmentalscience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.001.0001/acrefore-9780199389414-e-373#acrefore-9780199389414-e-373-div1-9
[36] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-dec-19-2019-1.5399379/tea-bags-are-bad-for-the-environment-and-bad-for-your-brew-says-tea-expert-1.5399387
[37] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/tea-bags-plastic-study-mcgill-1.5295662
[38] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/28/teabags-plastic-free-co-op-eco-friendly