STiR coffee and tea magazine

46 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 4, 2021 (August / September) eas with no alternate job opportunities and family dependence for (very) basic housing, sanitation, schooling, and health ser- vices on the estate manager, from whom women had to get per- mission to marry, for instance. The best gardens are much more professionally run but are increasingly focused on financing, pay, quotas, and technology that largely come at some loss to the field labor force. A late 2019 research report on the income of smallholders succinctly states: (1) that interventions to lift them out of poverty have failed, and (2) there is no business case to make the effort to do so. Obviously, conditions have improved over the centuries but the social isolation and lack of rights of today are the direct inheritance of past practices. Assam provides many instances. The tea communities of jobholders and smallholders and their families plus seasonal contract workers amount to around 6.5 million, close to 20% of the state's population. Most are mem- bers of just under 100 registered ethnic "tea tribes" – Bania, Dandasi, Malar, Talagar, and other small clusters, many with their own languages such as Kurmali, Saora, and Kui. One sur- vey reported a 75% illiteracy rate. Ethnic violence is pervasive. In one major upheaval in late 2014, over 100 died and 300,000 were displaced in a retaliatory conflict between Advasis villagers and Bodos. All these are structural, not situational. Financial realism and productivity priorities make poverty in almost every isolated tea plantation, village, and community just about inevitable. In- dustry consortia and NGOs are making a coordinated effort to improve the working conditions of tea communities. The Rain- forest Alliance, UTZ, Ethical Tea Partnership, UNICEF-led Improving Lives Program consortium of leading global brands, and Fair Trade certified teas are noted examples. It must be ac- knowledged that they have had only marginal economic impact and minimal increase in customer awareness and response. Wages are the key structural issue. The patterns are consis- tent across all tea growing nations, except Japan, where they are very high, as is the mechanization needed to offset them. They are captured in a 2018 comparative study of India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. In all three countries, average tea wages are "far below" other minimum wage jobs and the lowest in agriculture. Median earnings range from $66 to $95 a month. The gender gap is typically 40%. China has officially classified 227 out of 832 counties as im- poverished. In 30% of these, tea is the primary source of in- come. A total 60% of Malawi workers in Africa's second larg- est tea producer earn less than the World Bank $2 marker of poverty. Many growers counter that in-kind benefits, especially housing, add significantly to this. The evidence, however, is that social benefits are the fastest and easiest to cut. Absenteeism is high, around 30% in Darjeeling. Tea jobs on the plantations and the contract workers that comprise a large seasonal and migrant force are not attracting new among en- trants. This is creating a shortage of skilled workers and com- munal knowledge base. It's a lousy job. A disturbing figure is that compliance with minimum wage laws is low. The percent of workers receiving the mandated hourly pay in Malawi is just 10-30%. Debt is yet another way workers have been locked in. All too typical is a Sri Lankan woman aged 38 who has worked on the same plantation since she was 15. She would change jobs if she could but her hous- ing is provided by her employers. She earns $80 a month but receives just $33 in net cash. Food for herself and three chil- dren is $53, mainly bought on credit from the plantation store, Worker health depends heavily on work conditions, the quality of care provided by plantation clinics and strict adherence to safety regulations. Common problems are malnutrition which in Assam is around four times the national average, anemia and, for the males engaged in pesticide spraying, tuberculosis, and lung complications. Increased daily quotas for the same pay are an indirect way to control worker pay. They are typically 20 ki- lograms of plucked leaf. The opportunities of mechanization These are scattered but generalizable examples. There is not a single instance of basic win-win benefits for producers and for workers. That may be structurally impossible without large and unlikely price and market growth. Secondly, even if the main proposals were accepted by employers, they offer a ceiling that is still below a sustainable living income and at the bottom of every organized global business sector, including other areas of agriculture. Finally, and most consequentially, the economic case for mechanization is close to unanswerable. The opportunity is substantial. Pay and conditions are accom- panied by a growing labor shortage. Those can escape the job do so, with urbanization and mobility – pre-Covid at least – drawing the young away from the tea fields. Mechanization fills the gap and is in its early stages of expansion across crops. A major block- age is that machines are impractical today on the sleep slopes that mark the bulk of smallholder farms and most of the best tea va- rieties. For the flat fields that grow most of the low grade leaf for commodity tea bags, iced tea and cheap blends, the machine offers many advantages and the worker almost none. The core issue for tea drinkers is does the increase in yield come at the expense of reduced quality. The consensus in research studies has been consistent: quality suffers. "Hand plucked" and "two leaves and a bud" signal selectivity and judg- ment. Mechanization has often meant that lowering the cutters even a quarter of an inch increases broken leaf, twigs, tougher fragments, and even dead pests. The machines don't discrimi- nate – as yet. The new generation of technology is changing this and many informal reports from growers and professional tasters rate quality as on a par with hand-harvested tea. That mainly applies to the commodity crop that is used in teabags and iced tea. The long-term promise is artificial intelligence (AI), with ma- chine vision, neural learning models, IoT sensors and laser guides. There is a lot of hype and hope here. Mass deployment of robot- ics remains years away. The moves from workers to machines won't be instant. Capital costs, terrain and politics remain con- straints. But the direction seems set and momentum increasing. The c.e.o. of Dilmah, Dilhan Fernando, captured the issues in a much-cited claim he made in 2017: Robots will "no doubt" replace millions of workers in the tea industry with the shift coming within a few years. AI is likely to reach a level of exper- tise that supersedes that of workers. He accepts that the impact on the labor force will be immense and that he did not have the solutions yet "believes they are round the corner." For workers, that corner may mark a steep plunge to even more poverty. Or it may signal the path to a viable new economic growth path.

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