The tea industry is a booming global business. With 3.5 million tons of tea produced each year – including 1.6 million tons for export – tea harvesting is an important source of income for millions of workers across the globe. India and Kenya are two of the world’s top four tea-producing nations, earning hundreds of millions of pounds in exports each year. But in spite of the massive revenues tea sales generate, workers who pick and pack the leaves face horrendous conditions and earn far below a living wage. This report is a contribution to War on Want’s ongoing campaign for corporate accountability and Unite the Union’s campaign for the fair treatment of all workers employed by businesses in supermarkets’ supply chains. The report exposes the poverty wages, poor working conditions and desperate insecurity of workers in Kenya and India who produce the tea sold in British supermarkets. Shockingly, these conditions have not improved since War on Want’s groundbreaking report into the tea sector in Sri Lanka almost 40 years ago.

This research study is based on two Multinational Corporations (MNCs) – Unilever Tea and James Finlays – and their operations in Kericho. Generally the study aimed to assess the working conditions and terms of service for workers in the low cadre of employment at the tea estates. The study also aimed to investigate the CSR initiatives of the 2 MNCs.

Twenty-three tea estates partnering with CARE International Sri Lanka have successfully implemented Community Development Forums, which are ‘mini-parliaments’ that facilitate dialogue between workers, management and the broader community. The model opens up new channels of communication between stakeholders across the plantation region, serving as a forum where collective decisions about community development priorities and labour conditions are negotiated and decided in a transparent way. An independent assessment by the New Economics Foundation showed that that there was a 1:26 return on investment for estates, plus additional gains for workers and the community.

As one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of tea, India’s tea industry employs more than 1,2 million people. Two regions, Assam and West Bengal, together produce over 70% of India’s tea and are also home to the worst working conditions for tea plantation workers in the country. This report is the outcome of a fact finding mission conducted in the aforementioned regions on behalf of the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition (GNRTFN). It investigates and analyses allegations of serious abuses of human rights on India’s tea plantations, in particular how poor working conditions undermine the human right to food and nutrition and related rights.

Adivasi (indigenous) women in Assam, northeast India face multiple barriers to combating anemia and accessing adequate maternal health care, according to a report released by Nazdeek. Various government interventions meant to combat anemia are insufficient and unsuccessful in reaching the women they are intended to serve. The report sheds lights on the multiple gaps in the implementation of government health interventions meant to decrease anemia and maternal mortality on tea plantations in Assam – where the majority of tea workers are Adivasi. These women face multiple layers of oppression and exploitation, and are unable to realize their right to safe motherhood.

In 2014, Chai launched the Njombe project in the Southern Highlands. The project's aim is to demonstrate how a partnership approach between farmers, a private sector investor (in this case Unilever), government, donors (in this case the UK Department for International Development, DFID), and philanthropic investors can overcome the challenges of a tea greenfield development, developing a sustainable industry that puts the interests of local farmers and communities at the heart of its model. The purpose of this case study is to document the key elements of the NOSC model, alongside the drivers of success, the challenges, the lessons learned and targets to inform future interventions in smallholder agriculture that may benefit from scaling or replicating the model.

While Bangladesh has made commendable progress in all aspects of millennium development goals between 1992 to 2015, for example reduced extreme poverty from 70.2% to 35.1%, increased primary school enrolment from 60.5% to 100%, child mortality reduced from 146 to 48, maternal mortality reduced from 5.74 to 1.43 per thousand live birth (Planning Commission, 2015), gross disparity still exists in tea garden areas. Tea garden labourers are among those who are usually excluded from a number of government services with a view that they should be cared for by tea garden authorities. The tea garden authorities have the responsibility to ensure housing, safe water, sanitation, medical and educational facilities for the tea garden labourers and their families but these are not practiced fully by the authorities.

Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy.

In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system.

" The State of Tea" published in 1974 reveals the true price Sri Lanka is paying for providing Britain with cheap tea. It shows how the workers who plant and pick our tea are the real losers in the game. It describes the outrageous conditions they live in and the meagre rations on which they must exist.