The Moral Sip

Mother Nature is a good sized lady and recently she has been pressing down on my conscience. Yes, I am careful that my tuna is dolphin friendly (although that doesn’t necessarily mean a big old boat isn’t carving up an orca somewhere near) and I look for the fair trade sticker on my banana’s (even though it’s been said the stickers are unethical themselves, hand coloured in in a sweat shop not far from the banana fields) but tea is my real concern. I drink, on average, five cups a day. This is a serious business. I need to get to the bottom of my cup and make sure they are just tea leaves swirling about and not some poor farmer’s fingers or toes.

So I’m on a mission to find out where my tea has come from.

I am disappointed to find that my pack (Tesco’s Finest Earl Grey) doesn’t have a place of origin on the box. A quick surf of the world wide web however, tells me that Earl Grey is grown in China, it is a type of black tea blended with bergamot. Alarm bells start ringing when I realise that it is grown in the foot hills of a country with a notoriously poor human rights record.

On my virtual travels I also learn that there are three types of tea plantation. The smallholder, the outgrower and the Estate’s tea garden.

Smallholders often consist of families who own and work their own small piece of land growing and picking tea. They do not have the machines needed to process the leaf and so they sell their raw leaves to larger companies. Unfortunately there are currently nothing more than guidelines to protect these small producers which means that the sad truth is many families are probably being severely ripped off by the factories.

Outgrowers have a larger area of land at their disposal – usually around 10 hectares. They employ outsiders to pick the tea and usually have an arrangement with a factory who will process and pack their tea. The outgrowers aren’t currently regulated which means that many of the workers are probably quite badly paid. There are plans in place however by the Ethical Tea Partnership to secure stricter policies and ensure better practices.

Finally, there are around 1,600 tea estates which have their own fields and factories. It is only the tea estate’s which are regulated by the Ethical Tea Partnerships and there are only a hand full of British tea brands however who are member companies of this brand however – notably Tetley’s and Twinning’s.

I am not entirely happy that even these brands are doing enough to promote fair tea trade. By only regulating the tea estates, the smallholders are undoubtedly loosing out, as are the outgrowers. This is of course a shame, as soon it will become an ugly tea corporation monster and tea will only be produced en mass in these guttural tea estates. It would seem that the West’s intervention here has done little more than exchange the tea handling rights right into the hands of the large companies. The tea estates are owned by rich business men, rather than native tea growers and they now have a monopoly on the tea market and will continue to do so as they work under the banner of fair trade. It is a catch twenty two. Buy from the tea estates and help liquidize the smaller family run businesses or buy from the smallholders and risk finding that they have received very little of your money anyway.

It is a difficult predicament but for now I believe we must stick with the fair-trade brands so at least we can sip assured that our leaves have been picked by strong, healthy hands of men and women who are earning enough to feed their own family and drink their own tea.