As a girl growing up on a tea farm in the Aberdare Hills of Kenya’s central highlands, Nancy Githaigab would regularly wake up to the sight of elephants trampling through the neat, knee-high green bushes of her father’s crop.
“We would run out with a tin, which would have some fire inside so that it smoked, and bang the tin until the elephants ran away,” she says, gesturing across the misty green valley of the farm, which the now-55-year-old has since inherited. “The girls were not really supposed to take part, but I would sneak out and join them.”
The area’s elephants, buffalo and hyenas have long been banished behind the electric fence of the Aberdare National Park, a tourist hotspot which is just a ten minute drive away. Instead, farmers like Nancy are facing up to the far larger environmental threat of the climate crisis, which in recent years has been devastating the region’s crop.
An estimated 100 million cups of tea are drunk in the UK every day – and of those, around fifty per cent are supplied by Kenyan tea farms. Most tea from Kenya comes from smallholder farms like Nancy’s, which usually measure less than one hectare, rather than the large tea estates of India or Sri Lanka, which are perhaps better known.
When The Independent visited Nancy’s farm recently – as part of a trip organised with the Fairtrade Foundation – unseasonably cold temperatures had slowed the growth of Nancy’s tea bushes, meaning that they were only being plucked four or five days per week, rather than the typical six. Rain patterns have also become much more chaotic, with drought drying out bushes at certain times of year, while intense storms and devastating landslides come at others.
“Last year the landslides damaged six homes, buried livestock, and took out the electricity for quite some time – though thankfully nobody was hurt,” says Nancy. “This climate problem is really major for us. I believe that if things continue the way they are, the very existence of tea farming in this area will be threatened.”
The impacts of climate-driven extreme weather are a constant preoccupation to Nancy, both in her role working on her own farm, and in her position as chairman of the Gatunguru Tea Factory, which is a cooperative of more than 8,000 local tea farmers, which is centred around a processing plant.
Visiting the tea processing factory itself in the middle of the day, The Independent witnessed a tight operation of trucks laden with plucked green tea delivering their load, which then undergoes a multi-day process of drying, cutting and fermenting – turning it from green to gold to brown to near-black – before it is packed in sacks ready for shipping.
But upon returning at night, the machinery lay quiet, with musty, tea-infused air the only reminder of the day’s activity. “This is another indication of climate change: normally we have a 24 hour operation” says Nancy. It is a worrying sign that weak yields of the last year are set to continue, after tea production at Gatanguru declined by 25 per cent last year, from 24 million tonnes of tea in 2023/4 to 17 million tonnes of tea in 2024/5.
‘Calamity of climate change’
Nancy is one of more than 600,000 smallholder tea farmers in Kenya, who collectively have millions more in dependents. The tea industry is something of a cornerstone in Kenya’s economy, with the number of hectares farmed continuing to grow year-on-year, and the crop representing by far the country’s most valuable export. But all across the country, farmers are reporting climate concerns.
For Edmund Biwott, a tea farmer in the West of the country, climate change has brought a disastrous new weather phenomenon in the form of hailstones, which form after warm air from Lake Victoria meets cool air in the highlands. The hailstones appear at the start of the rainy season, tearing through the tea leaves of his crop, and making them unsellable to his tea factory, which is called Momul.
“Ten years ago, we had never seen hailstones, but now this calamity of climate change is impacting us drastically,” says Edmund, who has 11 people depending on him, including six children. “I have asked the factory for some compensation, because we are depending on this for a living, we have nothing else.”
The hailstones have forced Edmund to prune his bushes after just one year, instead of the typical four, which results in them being unable to produce sellable leaves for around three months, further compounding his problems. Last year, the 4,098kg of tea he produced was around 30 per cent below the 5,794kg he produced the previous year.
At times of lower production, the laws of economics would normally hold that the market should compensate producers with higher prices. But chronic oversupply of tea in the overall Kenyan market means that this has not been the case: Particularly rapid growth in larger tea estates has resulted in overall tea production increasing by as much as 3.5 per cent annually over the past 15 years, despite global demand increasing by less than 1 per cent.
Government policy around tea has also not helped a significant number of farmers, according to Bernard Njoroge, senior programme officer Fairtrade Africa. In 2021, a law was introduced banning farms from participating in direct sales to buyers, and instead mandating them to sell via auction in the coastal city of Mombasa, which is a process that typically leads to much lower prices for farmers. The policy has since been revoked – but many of the buyers who preferred direct sales had already switched to buying from neighbouring countries.
All of this has had a major impact on tea farmers around Momul, with some farms in the area forced to sell tea below the price of production in recent months.
“The last few months have been very difficult, and I have been forced to take out a loan to pay for school fees, which I have not been able to pay back,” says Edmund. “It makes me very sad… it’s embarrassing, and the worry drains my energy.”
A recent survey of Kenyan tea growers found that only one in five said that they were earning enough to support their families with all that they need – while research from the UN has found that the price of tea in real terms has been declining by 2 per cent per year since 2011.
For their part, the UK’s major tea brands maintain that dealing with the twin problems of climate change and poverty wages is a major priority for them.
A spokesperson for Taylors of Harrogate – which owns the UK’s top selling brand, Yorkshire Tea – told The Independent that the company was “committed to working with our suppliers and others to mitigate risks and support adaptation to the growing challenges”, while a spokesperson for Tata Consumer Products – which owns Tetley – said that the company was working with farmers to “train them in sustainable practices like soil management, rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation”.
According to their suppliers lists, both Yorkshire Tea and Tetley source tea from Gatanguru and Momul tea factories.
Gareth Mead, sustainability officer at Lipton, which owns PG Tips, said that while the impacts of climate change can be “devastating for individual farmers”, the key problem facing the market in Kenya is “chronic overproduction”, which has left the price of tea at around 2 or 3p per teabag.
“We believe helping farmers to focus on quality instead of quantity will improve the price they can achieve while also improving the cuppa so tea lovers will value it too,” he said. “This in turn will support the improvements we all want to see.”
‘Training allowed me to increase yields’
Elsewhere in Kenya’s highlands, Luke Wahome and his wife Irene farm a stunningly green strip of steep valleyside, which is carpeted down to a river with winding tea bushes. Part of the 7,000-farmer-strong Iriaini Tea Factory near Nyeri, it lies not far from the Treetops Hotel, where a young Princess Elizabeth found out she had become Queen in 1952.
But the beauty of the spot belies the poverty conditions that the combination of climate change and chronic low prices is forcing tea farmers into. The living income for Kenyan tea farmers is estimated to be around 50,000 shillings (£280) per month – but Luke is only able to earn 56,000 shillings per year from his tea, forcing him to live in extremely modest conditions. He tells the Independent how he has struggled to pay back debts from multiple lenders, continually repeating that his income is “not enough, not enough”.
The one saving grace for Luke in recent years has been the tea he has been able to sell as Fairtrade through Iriaini, which is a Fairtrade-certified factory. That certification means that farmers must uphold certain standards around labour and environmental practices – and in return they receive training towards better farming practice, as well as an additional “Premium” payment in every Fairtrade tea sale, which Iriaini clubs together and spends on the community.
“The practices that I learnt through training has allowed me to increase my yield from 400kg per year to 1,200kg per year,” he says. Before Fairtrade came, he was earning just 20,000 shillings per year – the improved practices, including around tillage and fertilisation, mean that he has more than doubled his income.
Down the road from Luke and Irene is Martha Mukundi, a mother of two, who is also grateful for the support she has received from Fairtrade. For her, the key benefit has been support in diversifying her operation, which means that even if the tea crop is weak, she will still earn a good income. As well as 5,200 bushes of tea, she now has 62 avocado trees, passion fruit trees, and a dairy cow, all of which now collectively contribute a similar amount to her income as the tea.
“Fairtrade introduced us to avocado and passion fruit farming, as well as dairy farming,” she says. “The increased drought we experience has unfortunately affected my avocado farming some years – but overall Fairtrade has had a positive effect.”
The reason Fairtrade is so impactful, according to Fairtrade UK’s CEO Eleanor Harrison, is because although there might be some costs involved in auditing Fairtrade operations on the farmer side, the extra income farmers receive via the Fairtrade Premium offers a “far better economic benefit”. Other well-known accreditation schemes actually represent a net financial cost for farming cooperatives due to the costs of implementation, with the Kenyan government suspending the Rainforest Alliance in the country at the end of May due to the reported costs that it was imposing on smallholders.
At the time, the Alliance said that it was working with the Kenyan Department of Agriculture to “gain clarity and to work towards a joint resolution quickly”. But four months later, the accreditation has yet to be reinstated.
The impact of Fairtrade is held back, however, by the fact that after 30 years of the movement, a significant number of tea brands are not signed up. The Co-op, M&S, Clipper, and Waitrose are among the most high profile brands who have. Global cut-through is even weaker, with even just these few UK brands representing more than half of the global Fairtrade tea market.
At Iriaini, less than one per cent of tea sold last year was actually sold as Fairtrade – despite the fact that 100 per cent of the tea produced qualifies as Fairtrade. Tetley and other brands have also sourced tea from Iriaini, according to their suppliers lists.
A spokesperson for Tetley-owner Tata Consumer Products said that it viewed certification as “a baseline in our commitment to sustainable and ethical sourcing”, adding that it does have some Fairtrade-accredited smaller tea brands in its porfolio. Gareth Mead, from PG Tips owner Lipton, said that the company “admire[s] Fairtrade’s ambition”, but he raises concerns about there being sufficient quantities of Fairtrade tea to meet the needs of PG Tips, adding that he has had conversations with Fairtrade about “how sufficient volumes of tea can be grown to their requirements”.
Fairtrade’s Eleanor Harrison has little time for any suggestion that certain brands could be ill-suited to the certification. “If they want to be Fairtrade, then it is very much possible,” she says. “When you go to these Fairtrade farms, you see the impact. [Companies] can play an incredible role lifting millions of tea growers out of poverty.”
At a time where cost of living pressures continue to affect millions of people, it could be argued that a movement like Fairtrade could struggle to cut through.
But Harrison points to recent polling carried out by Kantar for Fairtrade which suggests that 75 per cent of British consumers think its important that tea brands provide clear information about prices paid to producers. Data also shows that Fairtrade coffee sales increased 5 per cent last year, while sales of Fairtrade juice, sugar, and wine all also grew. There are currently some two million farmers around the world benefitting from Fairtrade – and the movement has most recently been buoyed by Sainsbury’s deciding this summer to certify its own-brand tea as Fairtrade.
Ruth Cranston, director of sustainability at Sainsbury’s, told The Independent that the shift should deliver an additional £1,000,000 annually in Fairtrade Premium to farmers, while also “reassuring customers” that the supermarket is delivering “meaningful benefits” to tea-growing communities.
But even in the UK, a country with a culture steeped in tea that has numerous organisations pushing ethical consumption, only 10 per cent of sales of tea are Fairtrade.
For famers squeezed by the climate crisis and poverty, though, even that can make a difference.
This article was produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
