The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations produces reports on global trade networks in specific foods and reports on the current global market situation. The two most recent give an overview of changes in the tea trade between 2005 and 2020 and then an understanding of the medium term outlook in 2023.

        The longitudinal study of the global tea trade network between 2005 and 2020 discovered that tea trade has been decentralized, creating a broader expansion in tea trade overall and predicted that this expansion will continue in the next decade.

        The top four tea producing countries in the world are China, India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka with smallholder farmers. Importantly, smallholder farmers produce 60% of tea in the world, with 9 million smallholder farmers in the four top producing countries. Smallholder farmers operate on a small scale model, in comparison to industrial farms that operate at the largest scale possible. This connectivity of tea trade overall increased from 2005 to 2020, where most countries were trading with more countries. This in turn supports the smallholder farmer majority in tea production because there was an increase in global per capita tea consumption. Additionally, from 2021 to 2022 global tea consumption increased by 2%, showing a greater trend towards continual growth.^[1] Overall, this means that connectivity increased decentralization of tea trade, creating a stronger and more resilient network. The strength and increased size of the tea sector means a higher need for labor. Any change at the consumer level filters down to affect laborers.^[2]

Bibliography

FAO. Changes in the Global Tea Trade Network. 2024. https://openknowledge.fao.org/handle/20.500.14283/cd0725en.

FAO. Current Global Market Situation and Medium Term Outlook. 2024. https://openknowledge.fao.org/handle/20.500.14283/cd0688en.