Storm in your teacup: How the climate crisis threatens Kenya’s tea trade
As a girl growing up on a tea farm in the Aberdare Hills of Kenya’s central highlands, Nancy Githaigab would regularly wake up to the sight of elephants trampling through the neat, knee-high green bushes of her father’s crop.
“We would run out with a tin, which would have some fire inside so that it smoked, and bang the tin until the elephants ran away,” she says, gesturing across the misty green valley of the farm, which the now-55-year-old has since inherited. “The girls were not really supposed to take part, but I would sneak out and join them.”
The area’s elephants, buffalo and hyenas have long been banished behind the electric fence of the Aberdare National Park, a tourist hotspot which is just a ten minute drive away. Instead, farmers like Nancy are facing up to the far larger environmental threat of the climate crisis, which in recent years has been devastating the region’s crop.
An estimated 100 million cups of tea are drunk in the UK every day – and of those, around fifty per cent are supplied by Kenyan tea farms. Most tea from Kenya comes from smallholder farms like Nancy’s, which usually measure less than one hectare, rather than the large tea estates of India or Sri Lanka, which are perhaps better known.
When The Independent visited Nancy’s farm recently – as part of a trip organised with the Fairtrade Foundation – unseasonably cold temperatures had slowed the growth of Nancy’s tea bushes, meaning that they were only being plucked four or five days per week, rather than the typical six. Rain patterns have also become much more chaotic, with drought drying out bushes at certain times of year, while intense storms and devastating landslides come at others.
“Last year the landslides damaged six homes, buried livestock, and took out the electricity for quite some time – though thankfully nobody was hurt,” says Nancy. “This climate problem is really major for us. I believe that if things continue the way they are, the very existence of tea farming in this area will be threatened.”
The impacts of climate-driven extreme weather are a constant preoccupation to Nancy, both in her role working on her own farm, and in her position as chairman of the Gatunguru Tea Factory, which is a cooperative of more than 8,000 local tea farmers, which is centred around a processing plant.
Visiting the tea processing factory itself in the middle of the day, The Independent witnessed a tight operation of trucks laden with plucked green tea delivering their load, which then undergoes a multi-day process of drying, cutting and fermenting – turning it from green to gold to brown to near-black – before it is packed in sacks ready for shipping.
But upon returning at night, the machinery lay quiet, with musty, tea-infused air the only reminder of the day’s activity. “This is another indication of climate change: normally we have a 24 hour operation” says Nancy. It is a worrying sign that weak yields of the last year are set to continue, after tea production at Gatanguru declined by 25 per cent last year, from 24 million tonnes of tea in 2023/4 to 17 million tonnes of tea in 2024/5.
Nancy is one of more than 600,000 smallholder tea farmers in Kenya, who collectively have millions more in dependents. The tea industry is something of a cornerstone in Kenya’s economy, with the number of hectares farmed continuing to grow year-on-year, and the crop representing by far the country’s most valuable export. But all across the country, farmers are reporting climate concerns.
For Edmund Biwott, a tea farmer in the West of the country, climate change has brought a disastrous new weather phenomenon in the form of hailstones, which form after warm air from Lake Victoria meets cool air in the highlands. The hailstones appear at the start of the rainy season, tearing through the tea leaves of his crop, and making them unsellable to his tea factory, which is called Momul.
“Ten years ago, we had never seen hailstones, but now this calamity of climate change is impacting us drastically,” says Edmund, who has 11 people depending on him, including six children. “I have asked the factory for some compensation, because we are depending on this for a living, we have nothing else.”
The hailstones have forced Edmund to prune his bushes after just one year, instead of the typical four, which results in them being unable to produce sellable leaves for around three months, further compounding his problems. Last year, the 4,098kg of tea he produced was around 30 per cent below the 5,794kg he produced the previous year.
At times of lower production, the laws of economics would normally hold that the market should compensate producers with higher prices. But chronic oversupply of tea in the overall Kenyan market means that this has not been the case: Particularly rapid growth in larger tea estates has resulted in overall tea production increasing by as much as 3.5 per cent annually over the past 15 years, despite global demand increasing by less than 1 per cent.
