Conscious Choice: Fair Trade Tea

Workers tend tea bushes just
before the plucking season
starts at Makaibari Tea Estate.
The Darjeeling garden was
a pioneer in the fair trade
and organic tea movements.
Photo: Jeff Devries

Fairer Times for Fair Trade Tea

Wokers plucking tea from steep, sun-scorched hillsides typically earn less than $2 a day. Labor unrest and unemployment are common in the industry dominated by a handful of multinational companies. The “fair trade” movement offers an alternative, empowering thousands of workers otherwise stuck at the bottom of the troubled tea industry.

After successful coffee campaigns, fair trade activists moved onto tea in the early 1990s. Today, Bonn-based Fairtrade Labeling Organization (FLO) monitors 66 tea producers throughout Asia and Africa, ensuring they meet high labor and environmental standards. Tea sold under the FLO label fetches a premium price internationally, filling special bank accounts controlled democratically by the workers on each certified estate. With the extra cash, workers have launched much-needed community programs — from retirement funds to school and medical facility upgrades.

But success remains spotty for this fledgling alternative to conventional tea making. Despite impressive sales growth — especially in the United States and the United Kingdom — fair trade tea captures just a fraction of worldwide tea sales.

A crop of dedicated fair trade promoters hopes to turn the tide. “In 2005 we’re really starting to tell the story,” said Maya Spaull, who manages tea promotion for TransFair USA, FLO’s American initiative. “We’re hitting a critical mass.”

More than a half million pounds of fair trade tea was sold in the U.S. last year, nearly a three-fold increase from 2004, said Spaull. Trade is picking up in Europe, too. According to FLO, worldwide sales jumped 30 percent between 2003 and 2004. (Data for 2005 is not yet available.)

Building consumer awareness and putting fair trade tea into more grocery stores will drive further growth. But the job requires a fine balance between meeting consumer and producer needs, admitted Veronica Perez, spokesperson for FLO. FLO’s annual inspections prove to consumers that certified tea was grown under fair working conditions. Some producers, however, complain that the process is overly cumbersome.

Also tricky, FLO must ever increase the number of certified producers — the only way to expand the benefits of fair trade to more tea workers. But it risks cutting into sales of existing producers if overall sales don’t keep pace with the number of newly certified producers. Since every kilogram of fair trade tea sold fetches the original pluckers nearly $1.20 (the premium price), sagging sales on any estate eat into those workers’ most direct fair trade benefit.

Sales of fair trade tea have dipped in recent years at Makaibari, a Darjeeling estate that helped pioneer both organic and fair trade tea making in the 1990s. Among other ventures, Makaibari workers have used their fair trade premium to build a computer center, start a loan program and experiment with alternative fuels. Maya Devi, a determined representative on the workers’ committee, says her community needs more cash to finish toilet repairs and buy extra drinking water.

Makaibari owner Rajah Banerjee expects fair trade sales will improve in 2006 and meet Devi’s goals.

Chamong Tea Enterprises, another fair trade tea maker in Darjeeling, reports sagging sales, too. But its organically certified tea has sold better in recent years, said Ashok Lahia, company chairman, speculating that organic labeling means more to tea drinkers abroad than fair trade labeling.

For more information of fair trade teas, including links to online vendors, visit transfairusa.org. — John Myers

May 2006

Fair Trade Tea

A small farmers’ cooperative offers India’s slumping tea industry hope

By John Myers

North Bengal, India — Most people have heard of fair-trade coffee, but aren’t aware that there’s a fair-trade tea movement as well. Fair trade only represents a tiny fraction of all tea sold, but the movement has slow but sure momentum, and one cooperative, Mineral Springs, is serving as a source of hope as a slew of tea estates have been closing in India.

Mineral Springs faces its own hurdles, too. Organic farming is tough to master, especially pest control. And there are questions regarding the cooperative’s use of the famous Darjeeling name.

But while much of India’s tea economy is sliding, Mineral Springs is looking up. The 7-acre multi-crop farm is one of 352 collectively organized to sell organic fair-trade tea to the neighboring Selimbong estate for processing. Mineral Springs Darjeeling Tea fetches its growers a decent rate locally and a premium price on the international market.

The small farmer tea cooperative is one of 15 licensed worldwide by Fairtrade Labeling Organization (FLO), the international authority on fair-trade certification. The group guarantees that tea, coffee, fruits and other foods are farmed in worker- and Earth-friendly ways. They also ensure the premium price — extra cash made on socially conscious international markets — goes straight to the original producers for community endeavors.

No Factory

Mineral Springs still has a long way to go because its abandoned factory sits crumbling and everyone here knows that the heart of any healthy tea plantation is its factory. The factory has been in ruins since the late 1960s, when Nar Bir Rai, a third-generation field hand on the estate, returned home after serving a 16-year military stint abroad.

The British owners had quit the tea garden in the wake of Indian independence, leaving behind the descendants of 19th-century immigrants from Nepal who first planted “the champagne of teas” on Darjeeling’s steep hillsides. The workers continued to pluck and sell tea to neighboring estates, but the bushes grew gangly and unproductive. As hope for Mineral Springs’ revival faded, starving villagers uprooted most of the tea to make way for subsistence farms of millet and maize. Selling milk and firewood gave little relief to a worsening poverty.

Four decades later, sitting in his tiny farmhouse sipping tea, Rai fixes his 74-year-old bright blue eyes on the community advocate who is translating his Nepali to English and talks about how tea farming now is making a comeback.

A Troubled Industry

Wealthy Indians bought out the British tea barons in the 1950s and 1960s, simply replacing them atop a plantation system almost two centuries old. Even today, managers take their afternoon tea in spacious bungalows overlooking their estates — a stark contrast to the workers’ rustic village life below. The isolated, picturesque gardens tend to dominate the local economy, binding the workforce to their fate.

Tea workers make less than $2 a day plucking, pruning and spraying in the blazing Indian sun. Unionization and labor laws have improved living and working conditions, but tea companies have a spotted record providing permanent housing, schools and medical facilities to workers, said tea journalist Tapan Deb.

If a garden closes its factory doors, however, a new level of hardship begins.

Due, in part, to changes in the global economy and, some contend, ineffective management, India’s tea industry — the livelihood for nearly 10 million people — is in recession. A rash of garden closings peaked in 2003, but reports persist of hungry, unemployed workers in some areas.

Tea auction prices continue to drop in the wake of economic realignment, shaving producer profits. The collapse of the Soviet Union, a major importer of Indian tea, first shook the industry. Stiff competition from Kenya, Sri Lanka and Vietnam (among others) came as aftershocks.

Business leaders blame the gloomy economic front and high production costs (read: worker wages and benefits). Deb suspects a different culprit: management at the floundering estates. They knew little about tea making, harvested for money and never reinvested in the gardens, he said.

Whatever the reasons, and despite government aid, conditions remain tense. Out of 230 gardens in North Bengal, Deb reported that about 25 are hard-pressed economically. About half the troubled gardens are closed.

Officially, the government says no one has died of starvation. But a human rights group reported in 2003 that families on closed estates in Jalpaiguri (the plains of Darjeeling) were consuming about 200 calories per person per day — less than one quarter the minimum requirements for survival.

Deb believes more than 1,200 people have died from starvation on closed estates since 2002.

The government’s relief efforts include various financial breaks for the industry and direct aid to unemployed workers. It also hopes a global campaign to protect the Darjeeling name — India’s most exported tea — will help.

Mislabeled “Darjeeling tea” comes from all corners of the tea-growing world, cutting into the region’s profits, said Sandeep Mukherjee, branch secretary of the Darjeeling Tea Association. The 87 recognized estates in the Darjeeling hills produce about 9 million kilograms of tea each year. But four times that amount is sold worldwide as Darjeeling tea, he notes.

Mineral Springs sold 25,000 kilograms of “Darjeeling tea” in 2005, plucked from land once considered a Darjeeling hill plantation. But the cooperative farms now apparently lie outside the recognized boundaries, raising questions about their use of the label.

Tea is a tight market and other planters may not look kindly on extra competition. Still, Mukherjee believes the matter settled, considering Mineral Springs’ previous designation.

Organic Growth

Farmers at Mineral Springs have more to worry about than any marketing skirmish over the Darjeeling name, said Sailesh Sharma, a Mineral Springs project manager for Tea Promoters India. Mastering organic farming and building community institutions matter far more, he added.

When Mineral Springs closed, the workers simply had no funds to keep the tea plants healthy long-term. Even if they could have bought inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, they lacked expertise in replanting, pruning and spraying cycles. Besides the information dearth, no one stood up to take collective action, said Sharma.

The weakest and the poorest suffered the most, and dubious lenders preyed on the poor, including those lucky enough to own cows. A local nonprofit entered the fray in 1973 and the milk cooperative replaced the lenders’ racket, earning better prices through direct sales in nearby towns. Other successes followed, but a North Bengal separatist movement in the 1980s stopped community development cold.

When we first arrived, “you could not imagine the poverty,” said Chandra Bir Rai, a community advocate and professor at nearby St. Joseph’s College. Crawling by Jeep along the only bumpy road connecting Mineral Springs to towns with hospitals and better schools, Rai pointed out modest concrete homes, remembering the stick huts they’ve replaced.

The political scene cooled in the early 1990s, as the region captured greater autonomy from the state. Rai and other community advocates were able to return to Mineral Springs in 1993, this time under the banner Darjeeling Ladenla Road Prerna.

The group helped the villagers form Sanjukta Vikas Cooperative (SVC) and quickly resurrected the milk program. A credit union, various training programs and even a blood donation camp soon followed.

SVC has grown from 254 families in 1997 to more than 450 today. Considering the community’s past, however, the return of tea making marks its most important achievement.

Many farmers still had tea bushes growing amidst their orange trees, corn and assorted vegetables. Forming a green leaf committee in 1997, they went hunting for a market.

Tea Promoters India, a tea company with seven estates, agreed to market and process the tea at its Selimbong factory. Six TPI gardens are certified organic by Naturland/Institute for Market Ecology (IMO). Leveraging that expertise, the company pushed for Mineral Springs’ certification. It made sense — for years, the small farmers had lacked funds to buy pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

“They were organic by default,” says Sharma.

Community organizers partnered to administer courses in organic farming. People like Nar Bir Rai, who finished only grade school, jumped into studies on soil management, composting, pest control and animal husbandry.

Not just tea, but the farmers’ oranges, ginger, cardamom and other produce is also IMO-cleared. Mineral Springs is the only band of multi-crop small farmers, certified organic, who own their land.

Fairer Trade

Starting in 2003, a new source of income has piggybacked TPI’s purchase of Mineral Springs’ tea. The fair-trade premium earned the farmers nearly $4,000 in 2004 and 2005.

For each kilo of FLO-certified orthodox tea, almost $1.20 from international sales returns to SVC for community projects. With the cash, the cooperative built a community center, tea storehouse and foot bridges, and repaired water pipes and tanks throughout the area.

SVC President Mani Raja Rai proudly showed meeting notes including a list to rebuild Mineral Springs’ tea factory.

To meet their goals, the cooperative must increase tea production by 20 percent to 30,000 kilos a year and capture some of the growing fair-trade market.

Worldwide, the fair-trade tea market is growing fast, especially in the U.S., where sales nearly tripled last year, said Maya Spaull, tea manager for Transfair USA, the FLO national affiliate. But she admits the label captures just a fraction of all tea sales, leaving plenty of room for growth.

Some fair-trade tea planters complain that FLO doesn’t do enough to sell the label, focusing its energies on certification instead. Transfair has added staff members to help boost sales and the growing market reflects it, Spaull countered.

Building a factory will be a major coup for the Mineral Springs farmers. But clearly, the stars need to align if a closed tea garden is to recover from the ensuing poverty. Mineral Springs’ effort, 40 years in the making, includes a dedicated nonprofit organization and a willing business partner like TPI.

The people — the principal factor, of course — have survived years of hunger to find their collective spirit.

For more information of fair trade teas, including links to online vendors, visit transfairusa.org, and equalexchange.com/tea-a-challenge-for-the-fair-trade-model-2 or call 774-776-7400.

John Myers, a Chicago-area writer, is currently traveling through India.

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