TEA-DRINKERS in the UK, whose 100 million daily cups cost, on average, two or three pence, are being encouraged to address the “woefully inadequate” wages, incomes, and working conditions of the estate workers.
The “Brew It Fair” campaign, launched on Monday by the Fairtrade Foundation, is accompanied by a report setting out how, almost 200 years after tea plantations were established in Assam, many workers face “chronic poverty”.
The report describes how much of the world’s tea is auctioned, which means a few very large buyers may dictate the prices. In a snapshot survey, carried out by the Fairtrade Foundation and Fairtrade Africa in March, of more than 260 tea-growers and -pickers in Kenya, only one in five reported having enough money to support their families, pay for food, and enable their children to go to school.
“As tea drinkers, we are now used to paying very little for, and putting little value on, our cup of tea,” the report says. “A small number of companies dominate the tea industry from crop to cup. But, despite high levels of unstable work, low incomes and wages, gender discrimination and unsafe working conditions, most businesses are still not taking responsibility for the impact their purchasing practices have on the people in their supply chains.”
An Oxfam briefing published in 2019 reported that tea brands and supermarkets took a cut of up to 95 per cent out of every kilogramme of packaged Assam tea sold. The minimum wage for workers in Assam is the equivalent of £2.50 a day: £2 below the living wage there.
The sector has been “slow to respond” to numerous studies and investigations and to take action to achieve living incomes, and has failed to be transparent about supply chains, the Fairtrade report says. “Some major brands are starting to share more information, however, little change has been seen for the people growing and plucking tea.”
The report calls on the UK Government to introduce a new law on human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD). This should be “centred on the needs of farmers and workers, with a focus on supporting living incomes and living wages, ensuring that the costs and burdens of proof and compliance are not passed onto overseas farmers and workers, and addressing unsustainable purchasing practices, pricing structures and business models which undermine progress”.
While acknowledging that the UK was the first country to adopt a national action
plan on business and human rights and to introduce the Modern Slavery Act (2015), the report refers to “shortfalls” in the current legislative environment. Last year, a parliamentary committee considering the Act warned that international best practice had left the UK behind, having “moved beyond requiring transparency to requiring companies to perform due diligence on their supply chains, and take action to eradicate modern slavery in their supply chains”.
Low wages contribute to malnutrition, child labour, and forced labour in tea-picking regions, the report warns. “On large estates in South Asia, workers and their families often depend upon the estate management for food, healthcare, education, housing and medical care. These may be a legal obligation, but workers have very little control over the quality and quantity of these benefits. Frequently, these legal obligations are not fulfilled and there are shortfalls in housing and basic sanitation provision on many tea estates.” Workers often have to carry up to 30kg of tea leaves — equivalent to about 15 bricks.
Among the challenges identified in the report is tea production that outstrips demand, so that prices are “relatively flat”. Production has increased by 26 per cent over the past decade. Another is climate change: several tea-growing regions are “predicted to face substantial losses in production within decades, unless action is taken”.
Besides calling on the public to lobby the Government for new legislation, the report urges tea-drinkers to buy Fairtrade tea, highlighting the Co-op, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose as key supporters. It describes the volumes of Fairtrade tea that producers can sell to Fairtrade markets as “incredibly low”: about four per cent percent of eligible Fairtrade production is sold on Fairtrade terms. The UK accounts for 61 percent of all the Fairtrade tea sold in the world.
