Indian Tea’s Sustainability Story

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By Aravinda Anantharaman

"We were always sustainable,” says veteran planter Rohinton Babaycon, who now consults for the IDH sustainable trade initiative, beginning the conversation on sustainability in the Indian tea industry.

“Even in the early 1970s, most of the gardens were organic. A young factory assistant’s punishment was to check the fertilizer stores — mostly cow manure that would stink to high heaven!” That the industry is on a shaky foundation brings urgency to the topic of sustainability. But where do we start? In Darjeeling, there are major environmental problems that manifest in landslides, soil erosion, and erratic rainfall. In Assam, labor issues come front and center to the conversation, while in the Nilgiris, the loss of orthodox tea production methods, low quality, and even adulteration have come up. All of these factors come into play. What happened between the 1970s and now for the situation to spiral out of control?

In his 2015 book, Darjeeling, The Colorful History and Precarious Fate of the World’s Greatest Tea, author Jeff Koehler talks about the green revolution in India. Here, “green” does not assume the ideas we associate with it now, of environmentally sound practices. Under India’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indian agriculture saw a rise in productivity in what was touted as an agricultural revolution. It was the “green revolution.” Koehler talks about how Darjeeling, which was producing 7.8 million kgs per year in 1951, climbed in production to 10 million kgs by 1960. He writes, “To sustain levels about 10 million kgs a year, more chemicals were thrown at the plants. These killed off useful microorganisms and also sapped the land of natural nourishment.”

Soil erosion, one of the biggest problems of Darjeeling’s tea gardens, had its beginnings in this “green revolution.” Add rapid growth of settlements, which led to deforestation, and it’s easy to see why the landscape has been rendered so fragile. Today, Darjeeling has returned to organic cultivation but is not without these lingering problems. The soil has weakened, the region is overpopulated, and although a lesson has been learned, a high price has been paid.

Says Babaycon, “Soil degradation, water conservation, pollution (in all forms), waste disposal, deforestation, and climate change are not yet priority for many industries. It has to be a full-scale government impetus to the point of enacting a law for citizens to follow — and in all countries.”

Environment and sustainability

Environmental sustainability in the tea industry tea is tied to the extensive deforestation it has demanded, and the human-animal conflict arising from it. In the Nilgiris, a biodiversity hotspot, tea, along with eucalyptus, acacia, wattle, cinchona, and coffee —all non-native species — have replaced the once-thriving grasslands and tropical montane (shola) forests. The soil here is also more sandy than loamy, quick to wash off, harder to contain. Efforts to prevent deforestation, plant native species, and increase shade trees in tea gardens are underway. Tea gardens are also a great sanctuary for native flora and fauna to thrive and propagate. Protecting them also means protecting the people living and working in the gardens.

Elephant herds in tea gardens are common and also a cause of human-animal conflict. For the herds, the tea garden is an extension of the forest and, with large tracts of land taken up by estates, it is inevitable that these gardens will be used by the herds. Both sides —human and elephant — have suffered casualties over the years. While there have been instances of people being trampled to death, there are also elephant electrocutions, poaching and killing, and cubs falling into drainage ditches.

In Sonitpur district in Assam, there are a reported 206 human and 131 elephant fatalities between 1996 and 2009 (as reported by the World Wildlife Fund, India) with more than half the deaths from tea estates. The World Wildlife Fund has since been working with tea gardens in the area, adapting the “Sonitpur model”. This involves replacing the electric fence with a solar fence that administers a low-level shock or a bio-fence that is made up of thorny bushes. Other steps include educating the people living in tea gardens on how to reduce conflict, to allow free movement of elephants along their usual paths, providing water bodies, and preventing deforestation.

A recent study (Looking beyond protected areas: Identifying conservation compatible landscapes in agro-forest mosaics in north-eastern India by Artitra Kshettry et al) explored the conflict on the tea gardens. The two species that come into conflict mostly are reported to be elephants and leopards. Most elephant herds use the gardens as part of their movement between forests. For leopards, the tea gardens offer adequate cover and access to livestock. They concluded that unless the district administration and conservationists work with tea garden management, it’s hard to fix the problem. It is possible to reduce the conflict so that the cost of tea production need not come at a high environmental price. 

Workers and sustainability

“There’s always a slant to sustainability,” says Shatadru Chattopadhayay, managing director of Solidaridad Network Asia. “If for palm oil, it’s degradation of Borneo’s rainforests; for Indian tea, it’s labor.”

Across the major tea producing regions of India, labor has always come up as a topic of great concern. In 2016, the BBC conducted an undercover operation in Assam, revealing unacceptable living conditions, malnutrition among tea garden workers, and lack of protective gear for sprayers, among others. It raised a furor, of course, with several British tea brands and retailers taking the teas off their shelves. Interestingly, the report also added that these estates were all Rainforest Alliance-certified.

The Rainforest Alliance (RA) is a certification that most Indian tea gardens that export orthodox tea are expected to have. It’s often demanded by buyers, as a comprehensive certification that covers several areas of sustainability including environment and social welfare. While RA is a certification that has been adopted by several large tea companies in India, especially in the last decade, it is not considered the answer to India’s unique problems. It’s seen as the “export” certification.

India inherited a feudal system in the tea plantations with indentured labor and a heavy dependence on migrant communities. In Assam, this caused a lot of social unrest and at least two decades of conflict between the tea industry and rebel insurgents. But that’s no excuse for how labor welfare has been addressed in the tea industry.

The Plantation Labor Act (PLA) was passed in 1951, to protect and regulate workers’ rights across plantation industries. At the time, plantations were nearly all located in very remote areas, and the onus of providing for the workers was hoisted on the estate management. Every estate that is 5 hectares or more in size, employing 15 or more workers on any day in the preceding 12 months, has to follow PLA. The gardens are mandated to provide housing, clean water, sanitation, and protective equipment. In addition, they are expected to provide nurseries, primary schools, and medical and recreational facilities. The act also defines the working conditions that must be followed.

PLA hasn’t changed much in 70 years. It’s been variously described by planters as “being draconian” and “belonging to the Jurassic age.” Here hinges the challenge of sustaining a large tea estate. The producers opine that PLA is no longer relevant as the tea plantations are more connected and no longer remote, inaccessible places. They have been asking that the government provide for facilities as per government schemes available, in particular with housing, medical, educational, and recreational expenses. They further argue that the estates support entire families of workers, and where once most members of the family were also employed on the gardens, it’s no longer so. And every time workers demand higher wages, producers bring up the value attached to the non-cash benefits provided. This is a perennial problem.

Producers say that 60% of their production cost goes toward wages and the non-cash benefits provided to their workforce. They say that until the government can intervene to shoulder some of the obligations to workers, or until prices — which have been stagnant for the last seven years — go up, their hands are tied.

PLA, interestingly, is not applicable to the small farmer and the bought leaf factory (BLF), which contributes to half the annual national production of tea. (Any factory that buys more than 50% green leaves from farmers is designated as BLF). Even large estates buy from small farmers, especially if they are under-utilizing their factories but are not considered BLF, as their volume of green leaf production is in excess of 50%. In fact, it’s this relationship between the large estates and the small farmers that gave rise to the BLF concept.

Sustainability in bought leaf factories

Large estates were not allowed to expand further and were dependent on small growers for additional supply of green leaves. But when they couldn’t guarantee steady buying, BLF was established. BLFs have come under attack for dropping prices while producing less than mediocre tea.

Siddharth Thard runs the BLF Kadamba Tea Factory in Assam, While Thard admits that there are many BLFs that make poor quality tea, he insists it’s not a blanket truth. He also disagrees that BLFs have a price advantage over large estates, attributing it to demand vs supply. He also adds that at auction, BLF prices are at the top.

Kadamba Tea Factory lies surrounded by tea gardens. A quarter of its produce comes from its own garden, but it is the sole factory for 120 small growers within a 10-km radius. Thard is a management grad who worked at Unilever before deciding to start Kadamba in 2015. “We wanted to focus on quality,” he says. One of the things he insists on is in leaf quality. In the last five years, he has steadily used leaf quality as a benchmark to filter his suppliers.

Thard talks about sustainability, too. He has chosen trustea, a certification code developed in India by multiple stakeholders, sustainability groups like IDH and Solidaridad, the top three tea retail brands, Hindustan Unilever, Tata Global, and Wagh Bakri, with Rainforest Alliance as advisor and Ethical Tea Partnership as an implementing partner. The trustea program was a Unilever initiative, as the company was keen to develop a sustainability code that would help it achieve its vision to be 100% sustainable by 2020. An auditable sustainability code was the need of the hour, one that would address a uniquely Indian industry.

An India-centric sustainability code

In 2011, Solidaridad’s Chattopadhayay — who had created Lestari in Indonesia as an inclusive program available even to small tea growers — and Jagjit Kandal, managing director and c.e.o. of Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited (APPL) began to co-author what would become the trustea code. It was completed and approved a year later. There are 11 chapters in the trustea code, with seven zero-tolerance points that include engaging forced or bonded labor or child labor, corporal punishment, engaging women and adolescents in spraying agrochemicals, and deforestation or encroachment of forest land.

The trustea certification is offered to estates and BLFs and currently services the bulk tea market. In the last seven years since its launch, trustea has verified 573 factories and 169 BLF.

Thard produces CTC teas for the domestic market and chose the trustea code for Kadamba.

Rajesh Bhuyan, director, trustea says trustea’s achievement has been threefold. First, it’s the only sustainability code formulated in India by the stakeholders of the Indian supply chain. Second, it has worked to create awareness and, therefore, compliance to workers’ welfare with a focus on gender equality and protection against harassment. Third, it supports small tea growers in their production to help them grow tea well.

For many small tea farmers, the cost of certification is a deterrent. Certifications are expensive, whether it’s RA or trustea, and some can find these costs prohibitive. Besides the cost involved in certification, there is recurring cost for audits. But Thard decided it was a worthwhile investment. As its central premise, the trustea code insists that the laws of the land are followed. And while Thard says, “I would like to do what’s right,” he’s also quick to add that, “Sustainability does not equal better quality of tea. That depends on the quality of the leaf and the quality of manufacture.”

And that’s a message that’s lost in the conversation on sustainability. That certifications don’t guarantee sustainability. That sustainability doesn’t mean better prices or quality. That sustainability, across the value chain, is important because it’s better for the environment, better for the people, and therefore better for the product.

Thard says he doesn’t have a price advantage with trustea— not yet, at least — but he is happy to incentivize his farmers for better quality. He recognizes that without this price factor, he can’t expect them to abide by his demands for staying compliant.

Small tea growers’ sustainability

The original committee that came together to form trustea has since changed. IDH and the three retailers remain, but implementing partner Solidaridad moved out of trustea in 2018. Says Chattopadhayay, “The Tea Board conducted a study to assess the situation of the industry. The result was that certifications don’t help the smallholders.”

The conversation returns to the small growers. Recognizing that the small tea growers are a significant entity, Solidaridad, in association with the Indian Tea Association — the 139-year-old body of tea producers — has created Trinitea, a program focused on small tea farmers. While they have worked on bringing digital systems to small farmers, again, towards better sustainability, a part of the effort has been to bring the regulated gardens and the small growers onto common ground. “Estates need smallholders. Producers should come together,” says Chattopadhayay. Trinitea allows small farmers to adopt self-assessment models, while supporting that with training. Like trustea, Trinitea, too, holds the promise of a selective market of buyers for its members.

All of these initiatives are important and necessary because they nudge the tea industry toward better ways of functioning and attempt to plug knowledge gaps. However, what can’t be ignored is the common refrain from all stakeholders on pricing. Over the years, the system benefits those upstream on the value chain. It’s a familiar story of industry and capitalism.

Sustainable pricing

The domestic market consumes a greater volume of tea than is exported but it’s largely low-priced CTC, not orthodox tea — it’s still price before quality. But tea, as Babaycon says, is not a poor man’s drink. “No Chinese tea within China sells for under INR1,200. If the retail price of a tea packet equals the retail price, say, in the EU or the USor Japan, there is hope for our estates and the tea industry.” 

He elaborates:

The cost of production ranges from INR180-200 (US$2.00-2.50) in north India to INR120-150 in the south. The average auction price in 2019 was INR155 per kg. There’s hardly any wiggle room here. And on the other end of the value chain, 1 kg of CTC tea makes 400 cups of liquor (large grade) and 500+ cups (dust grade), assuming 1 cup = 150-200 ml. At INR400 per kg of tea, consumers get 400 cups at INR1. But if they pay INR800, they will be effectively paying INR2 per cup. Even at that, what a difference it would make to the industry!

The cost of sustainability

There is an inherent cost attached to sustainability that is now being borne by the producers alone. For change toward the better, there is an onus on all stakeholders to bear this cost. Consumers, while demanding traceability, should agree to pay better prices, fair prices. The responsibility is even greater with bulk-tea buyers who demand sustainably produced tea. It’s only fair that, in return, they offer a few promises, themselves, such as better prices and guaranteed minimum purchase volume. As for the government, regulating pricing with benchmarks and standards is essential, but perhaps it’s also time to revisit the Plantation Labor Act and see how tea gardens can be integrated into rural or semi-urban development schemes.

There are still a lot of problems that ail the Indian tea industry — and there’s a lot of work being done to fix the problems. But clearly, sustainability is a work-in-progress and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Every participant in the value chain is impacted by these efforts and, therefore, equally responsible for outcomes. Work needs to be done from both ends of the value chain if we seek to see results sooner. And the true measure of sustainability goals will be in the long-term viability of the Indian tea industry, the synergy between tea gardens and their habitats, and, perhaps most importantly, in the quality of life it offers its workforce.