The Indian tea economy is undergoing acute transformations, with the divestment of tea companies from plantations leaving thousands of plantation workers jobless and small tea growers struggling with a general lack of knowledge and dependency on bought leaf factories and intermediaries. A review of the current trends in the Indian tea market and two alternatives sites Darjeeling indicates the potential of solitary enterprises. Also, it exposes the difficulties these groups face to emancipate themselves from the colonial-style tea companies.

An investigation carried out by Greenpeace India has found residues of hazardous chemical pesticides in a majority of samples of the main brands of packaged tea produced and consumed in India. Over half of the samples contained pesticides that are 'unapproved' for use in tea cultivation of which were present in excess of recommended limits. The results indicate that the cultivation of tea in India continues to rely on of the use o a diverse range of pesticides, consistent with previous analyses of pesticide residues in tea produced in India. This dependency on pesticides is an inherent part of the current system of industrial agriculture and in the cultivation of tea in other countries.

The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre reached out to 65 tea companies, requesting both supply chain disclosure and responses to a survey on due diligence processes. This report summarises the findings. As a result of the company outreach, 3,177 facilities are now listed on the world’s first Tea Transparency Tracker, where brands and retailers are linked directly to the factories and estates they source from.

This is TwiningsOvaltine's first report outlining their work on human rights in their own operations and in their supply chains. It includes information on risk assessments and identifies salient human rights issues.

Reports by civil society organisations… have highlighted the issue of low wages and excessive working hours in the supply chains of a range of commodities and manufactured items, including tea. They argue that corporate compliance programmes and product certification schemes have achieved only limited reach to the root causes of supply chain problems, including low wages, and many have called for a Living Wage for workers… Oxfam and the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP), a not-for-profit member organization of tea companies committed to improving the lives of tea workers and their environment, initiated a project in 2010 to increase understanding of wages in the tea sector, and to use this as a basis for constructive dialogue in the future.

To raise awareness on tea plantations and to promote the confidential reporting of cases, IUF plantation workers affiliate PAWUM and the NPCC launched an educational bilingual leaflet entitled “Workers in Malawi say NO to sexual harassment” with union representatives’ contact information. As Zione Pakulantanda, the IUF National Women’s Project Coordinator, said: “The Malawian tea industry is one of the country’s biggest employers. Women make up about 30% of Malawi’s tea industry but few of them are in senior roles. Most of them are employed under seasonal contracts and are asked sexual favours in exchange for renewing their work. The IUF affiliates call employers to respect the unions’ rights and negotiate with them to eliminate gender based violence and harassment at work and addressing its root causes as precarious work. This also applies to all IUF sectors.“

The International Centre for Ethnic Studies is pleased to share with you the digital version of its latest publication-country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka. This book emerged from a conference organized by ICES in August 2017 which brought together a broad range of scholars and practitioners who have been researching and working on the area with an aim to enhance understanding of the issues and challenges on the subject and generate recommendations for law, policy and practice. The book addresses the many problems that Up-country Tamils face in contemporary Sri Lanka, politically, economically and socially, as well as the historical origins and structural determinants of their current predicament. The individual chapter authors pay particular attention to the changes that have taken place for Up-country Tamils since 2009 and their implications for the future of the community.

This Working Paper by the Centre for Development Studies, India provides a detailed, historical overview of value chains in the Indian tea sector, the ways in which these have been reconfigured over a period of 180 years and the events that led to those transitions.

This report presents the results of a literature review conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN in 2012 on the impact of voluntary standards on smallholders’ ability to participate in markets. The results are based on an analysis of over 100 studies across a range of commodity sectors and countries. Evidence for impacts, however, comes from studies of just three standards: Global GAP, Fairtrade and organic. Moreover, most studies focus on two commodities: coffee and horticulture products. The majority of studies focus on a handful of countries: Mexico, Kenya, Peru, Costa Rica and Uganda. The results of the review can be summarized as: first, equitable and sustainable supply chain linkages, increased access to assets, and support for cooperative development are incentives for complying with standards. Second, both public and private actors have comparative advantages for supporting voluntary standards and are most effective when combined. Finally, governments can provide services which facilitate the inclusion of smallholders in certified value chains. The study concludes by making policy recommendation on how the public sector can mediate the effects of voluntary standards.

In June 2016, Oxfam conducted a Vulnerability and Risk Assessment (VRA) exercise in Mulanje, Southern Malawi, in the context of the Malawi2020 Tea Revitalization Programme (Malawi2020). This programme aims to achieve a competitive, profitable tea industry that can provide living wages and incomes for its workers by 2020. The VRA sought to address the key hazards and issues affecting people and stakeholders in the tea-growing landscape of SOuthern Malawi, bringing together a wide range of stakeholders such as national governments representatives, estate managers, union delegates and unskiled tea industry workers. It analysed the mains issues facing the tea industry and the people involved in it, then drafted suggestions to reduce the risks they face and provide further inputs into the Malawi2020 Roadmap.