Images supplied by Doke Tea
December 15 is a day that should resonate with tea drinkers.
For starters, you’ll see it incorrectly called “International Tea Day”. Tea vendors across the globe will offer you 10% off to mark this joyous occasion. It’s a great time for you to fill that Earl Grey canister or grab some gifts.
Alas, it is not all as it seems, December 15 was not created as International Tea Day, but as International Tea Worker’s Day.
Since 2005, it’s been marked in tea growing countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Malawi, Malaysia, Uganda and Tanzania among others.
For me, it’s impossible to drink the world’s favourite beverage without thinking about how it arrived in my cup. In about 2008 I started reading reports from charities and NGO’s about the conditions that tea workers endure. And it isn’t good.
Most of the major conglomerates in the world, such as Tata (Tetley’s among other brands), Associated British Foods (Twinings) and Unilever (Lipton, T2 among other brands) have been named and shamed repeatedly. And they’ve all, at one or more times, promised to do better.
But the reality isn’t better. Tea workers can earn less than $1 a day for work from sun-up to sundown, or if they are lucky enough to be in a slightly less poor area, $2. Children are exploited as labour and the conditions are very much those of bonded servitude – workers just can’t afford to leave.
Now, you might think an easy fix is to buy Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance branded teas, but there’s bad news there: many times these certifications have been examined by third parties who find that the plantations are not meeting the standards that they are certified to. Additionally, there are many companies that will slap a label on a box when they are not entitled to.
As a tea vendor myself, I’m caught in an interesting crossfire here – if I buy tea from a company that makes these claims, I can just cross my fingers and hope they are telling the truth, or else not make the same claims myself. How can I put, for example, “ethically sourced” on my products when only last year an employee of a Chinese tea supplier offered to send me bogus stickers for just a small bribe, so I could claim a tea was organic and therefore sell it for more? A company I had been using for years.
As a consumer, you have little hope unless you confront what is going on. Tea workers are malnourished, diseases such as AIDS are rampant in gardens in some areas (particularly Kenya in this case) and isolated.
Often there are rules in place that require plantation owners to educate the children of workers, to provide electricity, running water, sanitation, housing and food, Unfortunately, it’s cheaper to stick the kids in a broken-down cowshed with no books, give the families a bucket to wash in, a candle and a bag of rice and then bribe the local Government inspector, than it is to actually do things properly.
A decade ago, I came across the Doke Tea Garden operated by Lochan Teas in Bihar.
Bihar is a small state and just north of the Darjeeling area of West Bengal, and in the early 1990s a government report suggested that they should encourage tea growing in the area as it had high unemployment but plenty of arable land.
Rajiv Lochan took up the challenge and nearly three decades later Doke flourishes. It’s a family affair with his children occupying key roles as he has become a sort of floating international ambassador for the brand – although 2020 curtailed his extensive travel.
A total of twenty workers perform all the plucking, processing, pruning, cleaning, spraying and irrigation tasks. This gives them year-round employment.
They don’t live on the estate – in fact, charging workers rent for accommodation is one common way other plantation owners can underpay staff – but all come from the same nearby village, where Doke is the key local employer.
Bihar’s Department of Labour has set a wage for agricultural workers, and these workers get that, plus a bonus at festival time. They also get protective clothing, which sounds obvious to us here in Australia but it’s one of the key findings of many investigations – that tea workers are often burned by both the sun and incorrectly used pesticides.
If paying a statutory rate and providing the tools for the job and for safety sounds familiar, that’s because it’s what we here in Australia consider the minimum standard for ourselves. And it’s hard to see why we should want others to get less.
Now the price difference between my favourite tea in the whole world – Doke Silver Needle – and a run of the mill Silver Needle from China is huge – about US$55 per kilo. Does that sound like a lot? The reality is that it’s 14c per cup extra. Not a great deal for a treat a few times a day.
My tea business is a side hobby but for these villagers, it’s literally life-sustaining.
My hope is that on December 15 people think about this, and maybe skip the teabags and have some quality loose leaf. There are dozens of quality suppliers in SA, it’s not hard to find.
As an ironic side note, the United Nations has failed to notice International Tea Workers’ Day, and so has decided to start one of their own. So next year, keep an eye out on May 21 for the new day, which the UN has said will concentrate on workers and “promote and foster collective actions to implement activities in favour of the sustainable production and consumption of tea and raise awareness of its importance in fighting hunger and poverty”.
And of course, they’ve called it International Tea Day.
For more information about Doke Tea, head to https://www.doketea.com/.
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