The Big Swap: Tea
March 02, 2010 @ 12:00 PM
This entry continues our Big Swap series with tea. The Big Swap is a simple idea: for the next two weeks, swap out something you buy regularly for the Fair Trade alternative. Coffee, chocolate, cutting boards, bananas, and more. Learn more.
The Broken System
Much like the chocolate and coffee we have already featured in The Big Swap, tea is yet another fixture in our daily routines that starts with a complicated process and often mis-treated workers. Much of the tea we drink originates from the mountains in Africa and southeast Asia. Good crops require high altitudes and good rainfall and incredibly long hours from the tea pickers. Tea plantation workers tend to make even less than the minimum wage of other agricultural workers. Literacy rates among tea workers and their families are very low. Hundreds of people die each year from water-borne illnesses as most plantations do not have portable drinking systems or drainage systems. While the plantations are required to have primary educational facilities on-site, once the children pass through those initial years of education, they are expected to join their parents in the fields. This continues the broken system of labor in the tea industry where families who are born into the tea plantations do not have other opportunities.
Fair Trade Tea literally has the power to change lives. In a short film about tea workers in southern India, a family from the Chamraj Tea Estate is featured. All of the issues described in the broken system are addressed and reversed. The Fair Trade Premium allows a joint board who represents the workers to determine how to spend the additional income. Thus far, this particular estate offers education up to the college level. Parents only pay a very small school fee and the Fair Trade premium has allowed the estate to purchase computers, a school bus and to pay for the teacher salaries. They have also begun a pension scheme which prevents older family members from being an additional financial burden on their families. They are also developing a housing solution which helps families put money away to purchase land once t hey retire from the tea plantation. As heath issues have largely been undealt with on other plantations, the Chamraj Tea Estate has even been able to hire medical professionals and offers free cooking gas and typhoid vaccinations. It is hard to imagine how making a simple choice like drinking fair trade tea can make a difference. But, collectively, it can literally contribute to changing people’s lives. Check out our tea selection from Choice Teas, the first US tea maker to receive the Fair Trade mark.
Now What?
We want to hear what you’re Swapping, why you’re Swapping, where you’re Swapping, we want to know! So share your swapping story in the comments section of this post.
