All the data used in this article were found in the 2010 Tea Barometer of the Tropical Commodity Coalition for sustainable Tea, Coffee, Cocoa and are stated as being 2008 data.

The most obvious information is that there is a split in the producing countries between those favouring home consumption and those favouring exportation: China and India are both countries that drink more than 70% of the tea they produce while Kenya and Sri Lanka export 95% of the produced tea.

The explanation behind it seems quite logical as China and India have a long tradition of drinking tea whereas in the other two countries, it was only introduced to sell to a foreign market.

For auction and direct selling, Chinese teas are all sold directly while most of those coming from Kenya and Sri Lanka are sold via the classical auctions (see what happened in Europe when tea drinking became a must). India is in a third category as its production is sold nearly equally through auctions and direct selling.

When I tried to understand why it works like that, 3 reasons came to my mind.

The first and most obvious one is that these differences could be explained by the introduction of tea in a country “only” in order to supply a colonial power with the use of the sales techniques and infrastructures that keep on being used even when the country becomes independent .

Another plausible explanation was that the higher the quality, the higher the percentage of direct sales or the lower the production, the more the auction system is being used. However, this is not consistent with the facts as Sri Lanka has the lowest direct sales percentage but probably not the lowest quality and the difference in raw production with Kenya is not enough to explain this loss of direct bargaining power.

A third idea was that the countries with more tonnage sold were also the ones most heavily involved in auctions but again China with its “low” level of exportations goes against this rule.

Of these 3 explanations, only the first one is coherent with the 4 countries but the question would then be: why did the situation remain the same?

The smallholders/estates production split would seem to be linked to the timeframe and men behind the introduction of the tea culture (cf. the introduction of tea in Sri Lanka and how smallholders were crushed) but the facts don’t support this theory since only India has a really high percentage of its tea production coming from estates (more than 70%).

Another explanation could be that the countries producing tea in estates do sell teas strongly linked to the places they are in (a bit like terroir in wine) but the Chinese example with its 80% of its tea production coming from smallholders is an example that doesn’t support this theory.

Perhaps the reason lies in the workforce but even if in India, you need less men to produce one ton of tea than in the three other countries, the difference between Kenya and Sri Lanka shows that this explanation is not the good one either.

So in the end, what can we learn from this set of data? Several things but more importantly that nothing is as easy as it seems and that more work is needed to understand the tea industry.

If you have information or insights on how it works, please feel free to comment.