Story of the green leaf

Written by Huma Iqbal • September 2010

5-1 From Shanghai to Seattle, tea drinking is a ceremony, a ritual and a habit that has boiled in the pot for almost half a millennium - and the aroma is still strong!

From tea rituals in Japan and Morocco to afternoon tea in the midwestern United States, the profoundly positive role that tea plays in people's lives cannot be ignored. To this day, millions of people across the world enjoy a cup of tea at all times of the day and add to the rich and eventful history that this herb has enjoyed over centuries.

Several legends are associated with the invention of tea, its origin and consumption while much has been said about its importance in various cultures across the globe.

People first became enchanted with tea in ancient China more than 5,000 years ago. Emperor Shen Nung dictated that all drinking water be boiled as a hygienic precaution. One day while visiting a distant province, his servants began boiling the water. Dried leaves from a nearby bush fell into the pot, and a brown liquid was infused. Shen Nung was intrigued. He drank some of the strange liquid and found it refreshing. Legend says this is how the drinking of tea was born. And this is how tea was introduced in China, first as 'te' which later became ‘chia'.

Europe was introduced to tea in 1610, when the first tea freight arrived on a Dutch ship. Tea import was limited as a result of which it became a rather expensive product. It was in the 18th century that it become cheaper and therefore popular.

It was around this time that tea found its way into the Indian subcontinent, thanks to the growing British influence. The East India Company was crucial to the tea trade in the region.

In the beginning, tea was a fashionable drink in courtly and aristocratic circles in India. The East India Company in 1664 placed its first order of China tea to be shipped from Java to Britain. By the start of the eighteenth century tea drinking took hold as an activity for the whole population.

The heyday of the East India Company was over following the 1857 mutiny, but that of Indian tea production was just beginning. Darjeeling was producing high-quality but low-yielding tea but there was little tea cultivation outside Assam. The British saw the potential for more widespread cultivation and offered generous land leases to tea planters.

This is how India came to lead the tea business and tea culture. Today, India accounts for 31% of global production.

After India, Sri Lanka is the third biggest tea producing country globally, with a production share of nine percent in the international sphere, and one of the world's leading exporters with a share of around 19% of the global demand.

Producing a variety of tea from green tea, instant tea and bio tea to flavored tea, the lush green tea plantations in Sri Lanka are a pleasure retreat for tourists.

In Bangladesh, Sylhet is known as the tea capital of the country. The area has over 150 tea gardens, including three of the largest in the world both in area and production. The tea estates in Bangladesh annually produce about 55 million kg of tea out of which half of the produce is consumed at home and the rest is exported. Occupying ninth position among the 30 tea producing countries of the world, Bangladesh earns foreign exchange worth about Tk 2,000 million every year from tea export. 5-2

In Pakistan, each personconsumes, on an average, one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of tea each year. This makes it one of the world's largest tea importers comprising 225,000 pounds of black tea and 2,200 pounds of green tea.

Concerted tea research began in Pakistan in 1986, when soil and climatic conditions in the north were identified as favorable to tea production. Under the guidance of Chinese agricultural experts, 30 acres of tea was planted. In three years, a black tea was produced that was deemed of sufficient quality by the Tea Craft Company, and another 150,000 acres of the province were assessed as viable for commercial cultivation. In 1998, the government of Pakistan launched the $760,000 Tea Research and Development Program (TRDP).

Since its inception, the program has raised 2.2 million tea cuttings, planted 1.4 million seeds and collected 6,600 pounds of seeds from the Mansehra gardens in the north. Soil and process analysts have concluded that by 2011, each acre could produce up to 2,200 pounds a year, and parts of Baluchistan may also be suitable for tea growing. Former President Pervez Musharraf opened the country's first black tea processing plant in 2001, and once the rate of tea harvesting catches up, analysts estimate the plant will have the capacity to process 1,000 kilograms of tea a day.

Much can be written about tea production and the interesting procedure of cultivation and harvest that it follows. Tea cultivation and harvesting is a labor-intensive procedure where the plight of the hard-working souls is often neglected. The conditions of these forlorn tea workers are said to be dominated by abuse, discrimination and deprivation.

Some of the problems that tea workers face in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh include discriminatory relationship with the estate managers, where severe discriminatory conduct towards the tea workers has become a norm.

Language is another barrier that these workers have to face. In many parts of India and Bangladesh, the tea workers are completely cut off from the language widely spoken throughout their countries. They speak a distorted form of Hindi, or Deshali, which is a mixture of Bengali. Many language experts believe that this confusion stirred by different accents testifies to their cultural corrosion and further takes them away from the mainstream.

Tea workers in these countries do not have any social standing in society. They are treated like low-castes and depend solely on their employers for food, medicine, shelter, etc.

Bonded labor is another situation that these ignorant tea workers have been living with for years now. In India for instance, in 1854 when the tea workers from different states first arrived they each signed a four-year contract that eventually obliged them to remain on the tea gardens for generations. A century later, conditions for the bonded laborers is still no different. Their poor housing conditions, low wages, long working hours, social discrimination, and de facto restriction on free movement, deprive them of basic human needs, making sure that their children are also forced to lead similar lives of deprivation, exploitation and alienation.

However, in spite of all these odds, tea remains the most widely consumed beverage in South Asia after water. Served hot or cold, black or green, in a variety of teaware, a cup of tea has somehow become a ritual in our part of the world. Be it the karak chai of roadside shops or tea bags softly sipped in business meetings, the garlic throat soother or the famous South Asian dhaba edition, tea continues to be one of the greatest assets of our national lives.

Over centuries, tea has celebrated and enjoyed various rituals and ceremonies in different cultures. From the Far East to the coffee houses of Shakespeare's day, from the Imperial Russian court to America's Boston Tea Party, the ‘Green leaf' has seen it all. It is all the more important then to find out why tea drinking is under threat, particularly in this era of fast food and corporatized coffee.