The Fairtrade Foundation is calling on the UK’s tea drinkers, businesses and government to take action to ensure fair pay, decent working conditions and job security for the people who grow, pick and process the country’s tea.
As part of its Brew it Fair campaign, the Foundation released a report on International Tea Day (21 May). The report, Brew it Fair: Creating a Fairer Future for the People Behind the Tea we Drink, offers an overview of the reality for tea workers, sharing views from people who grow and pick tea in Kenya, and making recommendations for how businesses, government and the public can help making the trade system fairer.
Tea provides work for around 13 million people globally, with 60% of tea produced by smallholder farmers. However, says the report, power imbalances and unfair purchasing practices in the industry have led to these workers struggling to make ends meet.
Fairtrade’s survey of over 260 tea growers and pickers in Kenya found that just one in five of those surveyed said they earn enough income every month to support their families with the essentials.
Climate is also a concern, with half of younger workers citing the impacts of climate change as their biggest challenge.
“We are experiencing both extremes,” said Rose Mayaso, a tea farmer at Sukambizi farm in Malawi, “where it is very warm, and it is too hot … as well as a lot of rain, which also affects the quality of tea. Tea requires moderate weather, not extreme weather conditions. This affects the production, as well as the prices and the amount of money we get for our tea.”
The report also highlights the impact of the Fairtrade movement over recent decades, having supported over 330,000 people in tea growing communities across 11 countries. Fairtrade tea farmers and workers have earned £50m in Fairtrade Premium through sales of Fairtrade tea in the UK over the last 30 years.
The co-op model also helps. For example, the Gacharage Tea Factory is a small producer organisation to the north of Nairobi in Kenya that is 100% owned by small-scale farmers and led by a democratically elected board of directors. Gacharage works with 5,000 farmers and their families, who recently decided to spend their Fairtrade Premium on helping farmers diversify into avocado and dairy farming to supplement their incomes, as well as educational initiatives.
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Jacky Wangari, a tea farmer and Gacharage Premium Committee member, said: “The future looks bright for these young and brilliant Kenyans. We have about nine students enjoying full scholarships through Fairtrade funds… [with] two of them working; one is a teacher and the other one is doing a business in town. If Fairtrade was not there, these bright students in need would not have joined campus.”
In 2008, Co-op Group became the first UK retailer to sell Fairtrade own-brand tea. The 99 Blend is still sold today, sourced partly from Fintea Growers Co-operative Union. The Brew it Fair report hails the Group’s commitment to source 100% Fairtrade tea as ”an example of the retailer’s longstanding dedication to stand alongside tea communities”.
The report calls on the tea sector – including retailers, certification organisations and civil society – to: commit to transparency in the tea supply chain; improve human rights and environmental due diligence; implement sustainable purchasing practices, and work with tea farmers and workers to generate trust.
In addition, the Fairtrade Foundation has urged the UK government to take a number of measures to improve the lives of tea farmers and workers. It has recommended the introduction of a UK law on human rights and environmental due diligence. Centred on the needs of overseas farmers and workers, with a focus on supporting living incomes, the law would ensure that the costs and burdens of proof and compliance are not passed onto them, and would address unsustainable purchasing practices, pricing structures and business models.
Related: Co-operatives help to correct the imbalance in trade
The report also calls for the government to collaborate with businesses to change the future of the tea sector, and to honour the UK’s International Climate Finance commitment to ensure aid and climate funds can support tea farmers adapt and build resilience to climate change.
Eleanor Harrison, Fairtrade CEO, said mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation to raise standards for all tea workers is “urgent and essential”, and that the Foundation wants to work with as many actors in the tea industry as possible to test and deliver the greatest changes at scale.
“The people growing our tea deserve to be able to live with dignity,” she added. “That means earning a decent income, working in safe conditions, and having the ability to support their families and send their children to school.
“We all have a role to play in making that happen: from the UK government introducing a new law to help prevent abuses in tea supply chains; to businesses taking a lead on responsibility; and to all of us as tea lovers in the choices we make when we buy our tea in the supermarket.”
The UK public can support these calls by signing Fairtrade’s petition, which has over 4,000 signatures.
