A tea plantation in Sri Lanka, photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash Tea picking is gruelling work most often undertaken by women – find out what is happening at the beginning of the supply chains for the teas you like to drink. Without supply chain data, we are unable to exactly track what has gone into the production of the foods and drinks we consume on a daily basis, and allows a disassociation of responsibility from the companies profiting from these products. It’s important for these brands to declare their supply chain, because it holds them to account for the protection of the workers involved at the beginning of their production line – by making abuse discoverable in the first instance. According to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, only 20 of the 65 most popular tea brands have disclosed their supply chain data publicly. It requires a bit more digging.Īnd not every tea brand has declared its supply chain – in fact, most haven’t. What Can We Do? Dig For Information About The Supply Chains Of Your Favourite Tea BrandsĪs it stands, we often do not immediately have access to the information about who has grown the tea we are purchasing. In short, the supply chains behind our favourite cups of tea have high probabilities of containing serious exploitation of labour. All of these brands are supplied by tea plantations like those (or the exact one) named in the BBC Panorama. Supermarket red label teas are also popular. In 2015, market research found that these five brands held an 81 percent share of the market. In the UK, the five brands that are the most popularly consumed are PG Tips (Unilever), Tetley, Typhoo, Twinings and Yorkshire Tea. These plantations supply the teas we all regularly drink. All of these factors mean that it is a crop where child labour is commonplace and forced labour is not infrequently used.’ How Does This Impact The Tea We Drink? It is also a labour-intensive crop, and the prices it sells for vary considerably. JustKai, a New Zealand volunteer organisation dedicated to researching the supply chains for consumer products, puts it like this: ‘Tea requires a lot of land to grow, so is often grown in rural areas far from law-enforcement officers. Similarly, some tea plantations in the Assam region in India have been linked to human trafficking cases. The Malawi tea farm supplies Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate, which owns Yorkshire Tea. A tea plantation in Malawi was found by the Sunday Times to be host to many of the same issues and sexual exploitations. This is not an issue exclusive to Kenya – rather, this is an issue in the wider production of tea all over the world. Still of an anonymous victim from the BBC Panorama, kindly provided by the BBC.
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