In two weeks time, 100 people involved in shaping a sustainable tea sector will be meeting in London for the TEAM UP event that ETP and IDH are hosting on June 18th. With thoughtful people from throughout the supply chain (producers, traders, packers, tea brands big and small, and retailers), and from across the globe (all tea producing countries and markets) this is a unique opportunity for the trade to reflect and plan. Joining with them will be expert staff from development organisations, NGOs, certification organisations, and donors to identify how to scale up successful approaches and develop the partnerships to deal with on-going challenges.

In preparation for the meeting, we’ve been asking participants to identify the factors they think are holding back the sustainability of the sector and the changes that they would most like to see over the next five years. It’s clear that we have some transformational thinkers involved.  I know many of the ETP’s member companies and European retailers are particularly looking forward to our Producer Panel, where Alfred Njagi from KTDA, Sebastian Hobhouse from the PGI Group, Mao Limin from the Zhejiang Tea Group, Rohinton Babaycon from the S.K. Bangur Group and IDH, and Roshan Rajadurai from Kelani Valley and Talawakelle plc will be sharing their perspectives on future challenges and opportunities on sustainability.  

I’m also looking forward to having my own thinking challenged by people from outside the sector and in discussing the next steps in sector-wide transformation with Sally Uren from Forum for the Future. So if there is anyone engaged in sustainability work in the tea sector, who has not yet signed up, you can see all the details and register at the TEAM UP site.

This is a particularly timely event for me, as I am currently very focused on ETP’s strategy development process to ensure that we have the right plan in place for 2014-17 and on June 19^th ETP members will be meeting to discuss priorities and approaches. The more inputs we have to this process the stronger it will be. So to help shape the discussions about the next steps in improving the sustainability of the tea sector, please send your views on the following two questions to marketing@ethicalteapartnership.org

Q1. The ETP’s vision is of a thriving tea sector that is socially just and environmentally sustainable. What do you think are the biggest threats to achieving this vision?

Q2. What changes would you most like to see happen in the tea sector over the next five years?

April 2013. The rainy season has just finished in Malawi and the country is looking surprisingly green and lush. For most tea farmers in this southern African country, the plucking season is now coming to an end and they will soon start pruning their plants so that they have a greater chance of surviving the warm, dry months ahead.

We are told that the effects of climate change are acutely felt in this region, with farmers suffering huge plant losses during last year’s drought. Rainfall in Mulanje District, the main tea growing district of Malawi, has decreased from an average of 2,000 mm in 1960 to about 1,500 mm in 2012. During droughts weak and old plants are often killed off and they can also bring about physiological changes in plants that do survive, leading to reduced yields. Last year, Mulanje District also had to contend with major floods that wiped out some tea fields and damaged farmers’ houses.

I was here primarily to follow-up some in-depth needs assessment work with smallholders that forms part of ETP’s wider programme of work in Malawi. Not surprisingly, when you ask farmers about the ways in which we can help deal with their challenges they put new tea seedlings at the top of their list. The Tea Research Foundation of Central Africa (TRFCA) estimates that if gaps in smallholder plots were properly filled in, this could increase yields by up to 30%.

The cost of fertiliser is also a huge problem for the farmers we talked to. Factories offer loans to smallholders in order to buy fertiliser and other inputs, but farmers say they struggle to afford the amount they need for their full crop. We had lots of discussions about other ways to increase soil fertility such as through better composting and mulching. Whether the aim is to increase farmers’ resilience to the impacts of climate change, or to reduce their dependency on expensive fertiliser, training on good agricultural practices will help farmers a long way.

Another key point of discussion was that many farmers do not have a clear view of their production costs, and how these compare to the payments they receive for their leaf, few keep records of the inputs they use. This lack of understanding of their actual returns reduces their ability to make good decisions about their farms and their ability to negotiate on the green leaf price.

Having heard directly from farmers and other stakeholders about the type of support they still need to produce more and better tea, leading to more sustainable incomes in the long-term, we will now be planning our activities with our members and partner for the next couple of years.

This week, I returned from an eye-opening trip to China.  Having recently added China to my regional portfolio, it was a fantastic opportunity to see first-hand how and why the tea industry in China operates so differently from other regions. I travelled with our very astute regional manager, John Qin, who acted not only as my colleague, but as an excellent guide, travel agent, interpreter, and teacher of Chinese culture. 

We visited with export company representatives, toured various factories and farms, met with professors from the Zhejiang Tea Research Institute, and had a lovely dinner with colleagues from Rainforest Alliance. In fact, I was treated to so many delicacies and local specialties (including fried tea leaves!) over generously hosted lunches and dinners that at times it was hard remember whether my trip was supposed to revolve around tea or sampling every dish that Zhejiang province has to offer.

As a result our visits and conversations, I feel that I now understand some of the reasons for the complexity and opaqueness of the tea supply chains in China.  In particular, I learned that the very local processing of leaf means there is much more flexibility in the distances that leaf can be transported for final processing.  Therefore, the supply base for exporting factories is much broader than it would be in other countries.  This highlights for me the importance of the work ETP is undertaking in China not only from the end processing level down, but also from the farmer level up the supply chain.  In fact, while I was visiting blending and preliminary factories, two teams of researchers were interviewing farmers and other community level stakeholders as part of the needs assessment work ETP is carrying out across four provinces in China.  I’m looking forward to the results, upon which we can build effective partnerships and programmes with Chinese tea farmers.

During my visit I shadowed our human resources training course, led by local HR expert, Grace Wang. Having worked on a practical toolkit for the Chinese tea industry developed by Grace and ETP, it was great to see the course and toolkit in action.  Although it was conducted in Mandarin, I could tell by the levels of attentiveness, note taking, and some lively Q&A that the participants were interested and engaged.  I felt assured that we were providing a useful service that will enable factories to improve their HR management systems, a fundamental component of good working conditions.

I am sorry to report to green tea drinkers out there that a cold spell brought the spring tea season to an early end in Zhejiang province and has delayed it in other provinces. Although the weather was unseasonably cool and there were a few days when I was thankful for my trusty fleece jacket, I didn’t think it was particularly cold.  The tea buds felt rather differently though and I was surprised that the plants are so sensitive.  Where plucking takes place year round, some bad weather is a temporary impediment.  Where plucking is a seasonal affair, inclement weather brings the harvest to an abrupt end.  This is a particular burden considering that the spring tea leaves are hand plucked, which creates intense pressure to bring the valuable fresh spring buds in rapidly.  When I say valuable, it’s important to note that premium teas can cost £18 for one cup!  

Folks in the tea industry often talk about mechanised plucking being the future of the tea industry.  It seems to me that in China, the future has arrived, at least for the non-spring tea.  I was very excited to witness for the first time, the swift and steady buzz of a plucking machine guided across neat rows of tea bushes and quickly understood how advantageous this is in an industry with an ageing and diminishing work force. The machines reminded me of giant vacuum cleaners, with teeth.

I’ve come back from China knowing that what I’ve seen and learned is only the tip of the iceberg, but nonetheless feeling enthused with ideas about which challenges ETP should focus on in the short term and how we can achieve greater impacts in China in the longer term.  I hope I can go back next year to spend more time touring the tea regions with John, nurturing the relationships I’ve started on this trip, build new ones, and to start looking at the rest of the iceberg.  And I must also try some of these:

Over the last 15 years the Ethical Tea Partnership has been behind all manner of projects, helping to improve the lives of people working on tea estates.

Today we announce our latest initiative, without doubt one of the most challenging we have ever undertaken but where the prize of bringing about long term sustainable change makes the effort all worthwhile!

With Oxfam we have led a diverse group of organisations including tea companies, non- governmental organisations (NGOs) and certification organisations such as Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ certified, in a project that looks at the wages earned by the people who grow and pick our tea and also at how these wages are set.

NGOs have been raising concerns about wage levels for some time, somewhat to the bemusement of companies who have been paying for social audits for many years, which have not been indicating non-compliance on wages. They are also aware that plantation owners are required to provide a whole range of in-kind benefits from firewood to housing and medical care, or many of which would normally be the responsibility of government.

Early in my career I was involved in one of the first business-NGO collaborations which focused on the paper industry and whether it was contributing to rainforest destruction. This was at a time when environmental campaigners with inflatable chainsaws were picketing well-known makers of wood products. One of the things that really struck me then was how companies and NGOs were talking past each other, and I saw elements of this when I took on the job of running the ETP four years ago.

In one of the early meetings to get this project off the ground, I managed to offend most people in the room by saying I thought the debate on wages was “emotive and ill-informed”. While possibly not the most judicious choice of words, it was certainly true there was very little constructive engagement between different groups on this topic.

So the approach with this project has been different. Using our convening power we were able to engage a range of organisations with different roles in the tea supply chain. They agreed how we could collect the information we needed in a robust, transparent and standardised manner, and commissioned an independent assessment of worker’s pay and benefits on plantations in Malawi, Indonesia and Assam.

The outcomes of the study are reported in Understanding Wage Issues in the Tea Industry () which is published today by us and Oxfam.

The study found that despite meeting legal minimum wage requirements, the combined value of tea pickers’ pay and benefits in Malawi is around average for the country but only about half the World Bank’s poverty line income of $2 per person per day. In Assam, India, tea pickers earn just above the World Bank poverty line and under the average Indian wage. In West Java, Indonesia, pickers’ incomes are well above the poverty line but only a quarter of what the average Indonesian earns.

And the researchers identified a number of complex long standing factors that keep wages at low levels, which are often less than what is needed to cover basic household needs. A key problem is that pay is set by national or local governments or tea associations, so every producer in a region pays the same wages regardless of their productivity and any certification the producer has. Other issues uncovered include the importance of in-kind benefits such as housing, the wide variation in the quality and take up of these benefits, and the minimal influence women were able to exert on pay negotiations.

So to some extent everyone was right – wages are legal but they are low. In-kind benefits are very important and often mandated by law – and that raises issues for both producers and workers. And the structure and wage-setting processes of the tea industry limit the leverage individual companies and certification organisations have to influence change, making solutions difficult to determine.

These are challenging findings for all of us and it would be easy to be depressed. But actually, I am optimistic. Because, unlike before, the stakeholders in this new coalition have embraced the findings and now want to push on. They have experience and influence in different areas and want to use it to encourage other organisations to join the effort and help put together practical projects that really will help tackle wage and poverty issues in tea communities.

This willingness to work together is just so important because what we gained from the study aside from the various insights into wage levels was an understanding of just how complex, sensitive and intertwined the barriers to progress are, meaning that no one organisation can ‘go it alone’. Organisations at every stage of the supply chain need to be involved, really involved, if we are going to break down these barriers and tackle poverty in tea communities. They need to enter into new and perhaps hitherto unthinkable collaborations, challenge processes and conventions that have existed for years – and many other uncomfortable things besides!

I do not in any way underestimate how difficult this will be for everyone involved. I am also very aware that engagement with tea producers and associations and other stakeholders in tea producing countries on this issue is at an early stage. It is critical going forward that we,  a bunch of ‘outsiders’, do not keep talking to ourselves or do things that undermine national processes and approaches.

But there are a couple of points I am very sure about. From now on the discussions in these countries will be much better informed and less emotive and that gives us all a firmer foundation from which to develop solutions.

I am very committed to using the experience we have at the ETP in bringing people together to tackle really big issues. We will do all we can to make sure the right organisations are working together to make the real and sustainable difference that we want to see and which we all know is needed.

This question is one of the main reasons that I am in Indonesia at the moment and I have had many different answers.

As I described in my previous blog, in West Sumatra, part of the answer is more and better tea plants as many smallholders have bush densities that are less than half what is optimal. But while a massive project in itself, providing good seedlings is only a small part of the answer. So after the handover ceremony we headed over to Java where over the last few days I’ve been hearing first-hand what it takes to earn more from farming tea.

In Java, Pak Odih, a tea specialist and farmer trainer introduced us to some farmers, such as Pak Wawan who had achieved phenomenal productivity increases during our project by changing the way they prune and pluck. Pak Wawan’s results have been so successful that he has become renowned across Indonesia for his results, receiving the Governors Medal for his achievements and hosting a seemingly endless succession of visitors from Indonesia and beyond who want to learn more about how he has done it. As you can see he is so committed to passing on his learning he doesn’t mind explaining it to strange women from the UK in the pouring rain.

Spending time with Pak Wawan illustrated both the productivity and quality aspects of improving income. While Pak Wawan’s productivity had doubled in the last two years, his income has more than doubled, as he’s also improved the quality of the tea and was therefore getting higher prices for his leaf. This was mainly through plucking a smaller proportion of new growth – an approach that remains strange for many farmers in this area, who are used to plucking as much as possible so to maximise their incomes.

While it would be easy just to focus on success stories such as Pak Wawan, which we have seen replicated by other farmers, this trip has opened my eyes to the vast amount of effort and different interventions required to get to this point. One of the most impressive things for me about meeting Pak Wawan, was not his extraordinary productivity improvements, but the fact that through his motivation and position in the farming community he had influenced many other farmers to follow suit. Pak Wawan is a shining example of a ‘lead farmer’ and ‘peer-to-peer learning’ in the development jargon, crucial to most projects with smallholders. However, finding and supporting lead farmers is no easy task.

I met Pak Budy, who had been helping motivate and mentor farmers through the project. He came from the local area and knew some of the farmers already but explained to me how important the trust building process was. “I didn’t start by talking about tea farming” he said “we talked about all sorts of things – their children, politics, movies – and it was only when they saw me as some kind of friend that I could really understand what their challenges were in terms of their tea farming”.

He also explained how lead farmers did not always end up being who you might have thought in the first instance. He described one smallholder group leader who had come to all the training and was influential in the area but in the end implemented none of the changes. He was fairly old and Budy felt that his mind was closed, so in this case no amount of training would make a difference and was wasted effort.

But it certainly seems that it is attitude, not age, that makes the difference. In another area of West Java we are working in, the greatest productivity improvements are being shown by Pak Haji One, an indefatigable 70 year old who drove us up seemingly impassable roads to show us his plots and sent us on our way with a large bag of strawberries which he also grows. Pak Haji One grew vegetables for 30 years before moving to tea and owns enough land to hire workers.

Having that bit more income and experience of other crops seems to have made him more inclined to try approaches that other farmers perceive to be risky or challenging – as they require consistent application of adapted pruning and plucking techniques and a two – three month period early on when farmers need to refrain from plucking, seen as a big risk when incomes are low and tea is chosen for its ability to provide income month in and month out.

So another strand to our project was micro-finance, both to help farmers overcome the temporary drop in income and enable them to buy inputs such as fertilisers at the right time – crucial to productivity and a common constraint for smallholders across the world. We were very fortunate that the Rabobank Foundation joined us for this aspect, since designing loan terms and the payback mechanisms that are appropriate for farmers’ needs and incomes in each area and gearing up farmers so that they can manage the loans requires specific expertise and experience. The Rabobank Foundation also worked with us in several communities to strengthen the co-operatives so that they could better support farmers and also support the loan repayments.

Nelia, our Indonesia Regional Manager has had to co-ordinate a web of people, relationships and approaches and find practical ways of overcoming a series of challenges, many of which would have been very difficult to predict before this project started.

Spending time with farmers and evaluating the results of the work has also challenged some of our original assumptions about the benefits of improving quality and productivity. We had made sure before we started the project that local factories had sufficient capacity to process increased leaf  volumes, and we knew that higher quality leaf attracted higher prices. However, the quality-income equation is more complex than we had originally understood.

As we went round the farms, Dushy, our Sri Lankan Regional Manager, an experienced plantation manager and tea expert, could see that with the soil and growing conditions there was still considerable potential to increase the leaf quality, with additional changes to plant management and plucking cycles, and couldn’t understand why the farmers were not adopting such a regime. After lots of conversations with farmers, traders, factory managers and buyers, the farmers’ approach is making more sense. At the moment at least, if farmers produced the quality of leaf that Dushy can see is possible, they would not get the prices for it that are achievable in other countries – as the factories and markets that most smallholders sell into will not be rewarding them for it.

So as Nelia, Dushy and I headed down the bumpy track away from the plots of tea, chili and cabbages nestling under the volcanic hills, and back onto the tarmac road to Jakarta and meetings with the Indonesian Tea Board, we concluded that helping smallholders improve their livelihoods was both simple and complex.

Simple, in that large productivity and quality improvements are possible if farmers apply fertiliser at the right time and improve their plucking and pruning techniques.  But there are a lot of dimensions that need to be understood from the quality-volume-income equation, to the approaches that will give farmers the confidence to change the way they have always farmed, to the credit and distribution systems that will enable them to purchase fertiliser on an on-going basis, which makes work with smallholders complex.

Complex but hugely rewarding. Because what I have seen over the past week, is that when the different strands come together then between us we really can make a difference to farmers’ lives.

I have done many new things since I started working at the ETP, but today was the first day I have spent with a Protocol Officer. Tomorrow is an important day for lots of people, including the ETP, as it is the day that the District Leader of Solok will hand over the first new tea clones to smallholders in his area.

Smallholders are a very important part of Indonesian tea production but their livelihoods can be low due to quality and productivity challenges. We have been very fortunate to be able to form a strong partnership with the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) and three important Indonesian producers who supply ETP members, to support smallholders improve their tea production. I am visiting all three sites over the next week, starting with the Solok area, where the major productivity challenge is low bush density and the need to replace tea plants damaged by fire.

So that is why I spent this morning in the shadow of the active Gunung Talang volcano (from which the smallholder tea takes its name) with some very focused men from the District Leader’s team who were checking every aspect of tomorrow’s ceremony – from where the cars from his entourage would be parked, to the angle from which the  local media would take the pictures, to the quality of the containers that plants would be handed over in.

And what fantastic plants they are. Nothing can quite prepare you for the sight of 500,000 new tea clones, row, upon row, upon row of thriving green plants, all now reaching the 30cm height required to thrive successfully in their new homes.

The amount of work to get this point has been phenomenal. PTPN VI, the organisation that the smallholders supply, assembled an excellent team of committed staff, who created this nursery from scratch – clearing the land, constructing the nursery structure from bamboo, finding the appropriate sub-soil and top-soil, harvesting the seedlings from the mother bushes, maintaining them carefully at the right temperature and keeping them free from pests and disease.

The District Leader’s presence tomorrow is an important part of ensuring the longevity of the tea plants and sustainability of this project. His involvement helps show the importance of looking after these new tea plants to everyone in the area. His administration can provide support to farmers in the long term and help spread good practice. His attendance at the handover ceremony is a public acknowledgement of the importance of tea producers supporting their smallholder supply base – and apparently ensures that everyone involved is treated to a very good breakfast!