Seven Cups

This a comment that I wrote following Heidi Kaiser wrote on the blog T Ching announcing that the World Tea News will have it’s own URL and charge a subscription. The is a photo of the Wall Street Journal on a driveway, as if there is somehow a parallel between the two. The tea industry has very little in the way of good tea publication, though there are some emerging on-line, but I have not been very happy to see the World Tea News becoming the default periodical about tea given their association with the World Tea Expo.

Although Heidi has written some good pieces since she has been in at the “World Tea News”, I don’t feel that the content presented in the “World Tea News” rises to the level of news, almost all of which one can come to by setting a few Google alerts, hardly worth the price of the subscription. Because the “World Tea News” is a marketing arm of the World Tea Expo, formally Take Me To Tea, the only tea trade show in the US, it seems unlikely that there could be in unbiased reporting from the WTN. Even though the World Tea Expo is the only game in town, it doesn’t mean that they speak for the the tea industry. WTN does however provide a good central location for reading the press releases issued by tea companies and is a little less self serving than Adagios Tea Trends, and certainly not “independent news and information from the only source that focuses exclusively on the specialty tea trade”. It is really pretty amazing that they should make that claim.

It is true that the tea industry needs good information, and that there is very little be be found either in online or in print. I hate to hear the line, “we are all in this together” because it means that we are all agreeing to a being satisfied with a shocking level of mediocrity and tolerance for a level of deceptive marketing that we know is not accurate, but we wink at it because we are ‘all in it together’. It is true that being in the specialty tea industry is hard from a business stand point, (I even think that term ’specialty tea’ is misleading to the point of being meaningless) and that we have to work together to establish a market for better quality teas. There is a growing list of very good content development people and companies that are really making an effort to disseminate better information about tea. The thing that makes good information about the industry so difficult to come by is the amount of deception involved in marketing tea that we all enable as a shared passive conspiracy. The truth is that there is a lot of ugly news out there regarding the tea industry that is not being mentioned and I don’t see the World Tea Expo risking its market by talking about it.

That being said, I think that Heidi has done an excellent job as editor there, and I don’t believe that good journalism should be free. Heidi, start your own publication. I’ll subscribe to that. There is certainly a need in our industry.

I am in our new teahouse in the Tucson Botanical Gardens and enjoying a cup of. Meizhan oolong, one of my favorite WuYiShan rock oolongs. I am reminded of the tea drinking scholars of the Tang Dynasty that preferred to drink their tea in a natural setting. The garden is beautiful. When to Tucson in 1987 I fell in love with the lushness of the Sonoran Desert. A few years later I was exposed to good Chinese green tea through my friendship with a Chinese graduate student who came from an area rich in tea and tea culture. My life was set on an unexpected course as a result. I never returned to live in the city that I had loved so much and the North Beach espresso that I couldn’t get enough of. It is perhaps unusual to associate tea and the desert, but as I sit here this morning it seems perfectly right. The Chinese settled in Tucson more than 150 years ago. They are not thought of having been so, at least in most peoples minds, but they have always been a part of the settling of the West, and of course they brought tea. There was a very vibrant Chinatown here until it got wiped out along with a good chunk of the old barrio. A lot of the residents were bilingual in Chinese and Spanish. Selling tea in the desert is a sweet pleasure. Austin Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

This entry has been sitting around unfinished in my drafts folder for sometime now. I have wanted to write an update about Fair Trade since I saw Heidi Kaiser’s articles about “How Fair is Fair Trade(Part One)” and “How Fair is Fair Trade(Part Two)” Both articles are good reading. There was a article in the New York Times from 2006, that I wrote about at the time also discussing the meaningfulness of Fair Trade Certification. Although the certification has questionable value outside of marketing, consumers still look for the fair trade logo in making buying choices.

One of the things that I love about the internet, is that you can pretty easily research statistics and claims someone is making on their labels. It seems as if not a lot of consumers are doing the same, or they would find that the claims are greatly exaggerated. I spend a lot of time in China and have been very interested in fair trade for many years. I know that there is not a big fair trade movement in China, especially with tea, so when I hear that there is, I’m a bit puzzled. Both of the organizations mentioned in Heidi’s article have website so I decided to do some fact checking. There are some links below so that you can do the same.

Fair trade certification is based to a large degree is based on price. The theory is that you are not an exploiter of peasant farmers if you are paying a ‘fair’ price for the product. The European FLO, which is more comprehensive that the American version TransFair USA, does have guidelines for plantation workers. I looked up the price for tea in China and the ‘Fair’ price’ using their price database. I was surprised to see that it was $1.20 per kilo and add $.50 for the fair price. I can tell you that you can not buy the lowest quality tea that China produces for that price. So it would appear that the bar is set very low for fair trade certification.

You would think that because the requirements for pretty easily met that there would be a lot more people signing up for certification. There are only a handful of certified producers in China. They are for the most part clustered around the WuYuan Mountain area Juangxi province. Of course the only agency that can do that kind of organizing across such a large area is governmental. The was a producer in Yunnan that was listed on the TransFair USA site, but thier profile has been removed. I still see a lot of TransFair USA logos on tea products that are said to come from other provinces, and it makes me wonder what that is all about.

There is a bigger question about what is meaningful in relationship to fair trade regarding tea in China. I would say that fair trade is not relevant at all in relationship to good quality tea. The producers of this level of tea do pretty well financially compared to peasant farmers in China that are growing other crops, and all of the skilled workers benefit financially, from farmers, to pickers, to tea makers. Chinese agriculture is not based on the corporate/plantation model as it is in the rest of the world. Fair trade issues are much more relevant on the plantations of Africa, South America were most of America’s tea comes from, where conditions for workers can be abysmal. That is not to say that the peasant tea farmers don’t need the support of consumers, but issues are much more complicated that just price, and be virtually all farming in China is done by small farmers, the organizational issues are very different than in the international plantation model.

Last year I visited the office of IMO in Nanjing. IMO does all of the international organic certifications within China. They had just implemented a socially responsible fair trade certification that would have a meaningful impact in the communities that received it. It is a certification that is called IMO Social & FairTrade Certification. This certification is a good start and more meaningful in China. It is also not expensive. With the IMO certification they are not focusing on price guidelines, but for things like insuring workers for health and retirement, and providing education in the rural communities for children. They have yet to certify anyone in China because the program is new, but I’m hoping to see it become more important in the future.

China is not the black box it once was, and I think that consumers need to check the Fair Trade and Organic certifications that are being placed on Chinese products. The tea company has the responsibility to supply verification for those claims and consumers need not just take it at face value. There is a lot of deception that goes on in the tea industry, and it is rooted in sourcing as a trade secret. Never the less, the agent for change will not be tea companies, but it will be the consumer that asks the hard questions and demands answers.

Austin