This article was written in collaboration with Soy Te and Pei Chen Tea Palace.
During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, many immigrants came to the Argentine countryside. Among their belongings, they took tea seeds with them from different sources in Russia, India, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. They all came to settle in Misiones, in northern Argentina.
During the 1950s, Argentine tea production began to industrialize with the arrival of industrial processing machinery. Before this point, small-scale tea farmers used to hand-pluck and process their tea, which they then sold directly to London's Central Market, providing a living for the rest of the year. As industrialization became more rampant, families were taught that they only had to grow the tea. They would then allow large-scale factories, or “drying plants,” to take over the processing, mainly to make CTC tea for tea bags.
Today, two generations later, none of them remember how to make craft tea, and mass selling coupled with overproduction has dragged the price of freshly cut tea leaves down to $0.01 USD per kilogram (two pounds). This payout causes tea-growing families to have a net loss on the crop after having worked all year to grow the tea, and it has caused many of them to rip out or cut down their tea plantations to plant more lucrative crops such as tobacco, corn, or cassava root. Since ripping out tea trees is extremely expensive, many farming families have gone under and then had to sell their farms to the only entities that can afford to purchase them: the five huge multimillion-dollar industrial tea factories, which have been amassing more and more of the land while exporting processed tea fannings and dust to Coca-Cola, Lipton, and Twinings for many millions of dollars each year. The tea farmer who goes bust sells their land for next to nothing and moves away to a big city, where they set up a small mom-and-pop store or business and stay until they die of old age, since all the young people abandoned their farms years prior in search of a more profitable profession. Thus, Argentina lost a net 20% of its tea production between 2017 and 2020 as more and more tea plantations were eradicated.
The government's solution is to develop clonal tea cultivars, geared not toward improving tea quality but toward faster growth. Those cents on the dollar that families make will be multiplied in some way. Few families remain with tea plantations grown from select seeds from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The plants grow slowly, but the tea has high-quality flavor and aroma in the cup. Industrial tea companies value this far less than mass production. Nevertheless, as families replace their tea bushes with aggressive-growth clones, the amount they receive for the tea plummets.
Land and the riches produced on it by tea are concentrated in the hands of a tight oligopoly of industrial factories, with many politicians (now millionaires) as accomplices. This trend has caused the “green gold” of old to become a sentence to bankruptcy for more and more of the colonizing immigrants' descendants. They originally came from Poland, Russia, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Ukraine, Japan, and many other countries, searching for a better future. In the end, one could say that tea cultivation by local families—small-scale producers—is in danger of extinction. In the meantime, the families of the big factory owners travel the world, play golf alongside their ever-expanding tea fields, and use their race cars to run races frivolously at the local racetrack. Extremely impoverished shantytowns surround it all due to the displacement of more and more manual workers through the implementation of ever-larger and more efficient harvesting machines. The use of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers is rampant. The land has been devastated, and the cells of the tea leaves that grow under the Misiones sun contain nothing but bitterness and liquid, as if they were made up of the tears of the “inefficient” local farmers who were strategically uprooted, as is the case on many tea plantations today.
Fortunately, there are always those who rebel to defy the norm: the Sand family is an example of such rebellion. From the very beginning, they refused to cut down their tea bushes, selling eggs, yerba mate, and honey to keep their farm from going under. In 2021, they were one of the few families that still had tea forests planted from seed in northern Argentina. They wanted to learn from high-level experts how to improve their tea production processes and achieve symbiosis between the land and the tea producers.
Ryan of Pei Chen Tea Palace, alongside his business partners in Argentina, began supporting the Sand family and several other families in northern Argentina to develop high-quality teas that would put Latin America on the map as a place of artisanal tea production while respecting the land and improving life for tea producers.
In 2022, with the vision and coordination of Ryan and his team, we collaborated with other Latin American countries under the guidance of Shunan Teng and the Tea Drunk team, shared the techniques used to make the finest teas in China, and began production in Argentina.
Continue reading: Misiones on the Tea Map: Our First Visit to Alma Annette.
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