STiR coffee and tea magazine

44 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 4, 2021 (August / September) By Peter GW Keen H istorically, the cost and quality of tea harvesting depended on the fingers of the pluckers, mostly women, who epitomize the tradition of "two leaves and a bud." Today, fingers are increasingly being replaced by the cutting blades of machines. This embodies the priority of radically improving costs to compete and even survive in a price-intensive export market, with what is global weirding more than just warming producing increased drought, floods, disruption of seasonal harvests, pests, and soil damage. Mechanization of harvesting transforms costs but also transforms the lives of en- tire communities. Workers in the field face a brutal irony: they earn so little that pov- erty governs just about every dimension of their life, but their wages and "inkind" non-cash housing, food allowances and varying degrees of medical and educational services are too expensive for growers to afford. The shortage of skilled workers is increasing, but not their pay and wellbeing. Though they earn just $2-4 a day, between the World Bank's widely used metric of extreme poverty and a basic living wage, they constitute a full 60% of production costs. If workers lose their jobs, they lose their entire income and often housing and are caught in the poverty trap. If they keep them. They remain trapped. The alternative to labor – mechanization -- is easy to summarize: just two work- ers using a handheld gas- or battery-powered cutter device can replace as many as 40 traditional pluckers. Single worker mechanical shears alone improve output 10-20 fold, reducing labor costs from $0.14 to $.04 a kilo according to several surveys. The ma- chines cost as little as $1,000. On large, flat fields, massive machines could easily chop a car fleet to leaf-size morsels. The detailed productivity improvement figures are not fully reliable and precise. It's enough to summarize them as "a lot." The new dynamic is manual versus mechanized. In almost every country, the indus- try is highly regulated so the "versus" gets fought over in courts, politics, and strikes. More and more, constraints on mechanization are being removed and earnings erod- ed. Here are news headlines from 2019 through 2021: "Assam High Court Halts Tea Worker Wage [Increase]." "Twenty Plantation Companies Move to Courts Against Wage Increase of Estate Workers." "Kanya Platers Prevail as Court Permits Mechani- zation." Women Bear the Brunt as Mechanization Wipes out Tea Sector Jobs." The dilemma: 2 tea workers using a single handheld cutting device – costing as little as $$1,000 – can replace up to 40 traditional tea pluckers. From the Tea Fields… From the Tea Fields… The Widening Labor vs Machine Gap The Widening Labor vs Machine Gap

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