Where does tea come from?

Tea is the leaf of a single evergreen species, Camellia sinensis, in two main varieties: the small-leaved sinensis type from China, which tolerates cold and suits green tea, and the large-leaved assamica type, which yields more in hot, wet lowlands and makes most of the world's black tea. The plant wants acid, free-draining soil, rainfall spread through the year rather than delivered in one burst, warm days, cool nights and no frost. Altitude slows growth and concentrates flavor, which is why the highest-priced leaf comes from Darjeeling, the Sri Lankan high country and the Kenyan highlands rather than from the most productive fields.

In 2024 China harvested 16.3 million tonnes of tea leaves, 50% of the world's 32.7 million tonnes (FAOSTAT). India was second with 19%, then Kenya (8.2%), Sri Lanka (4.6%) and Turkey (Türkiye) (4.3%). One caution about that table: FAOSTAT counts tea leaves as plucked, the fresh green leaf, not the dried product that reaches a shop. Roughly four to five kilograms of green leaf make one kilogram of made tea, so the figures here are several times larger than the made-tea totals quoted by the trade.

The shape of the map is colonial as much as climatic. China has grown and drunk tea for well over a thousand years and still consumes most of what it produces, largely as green tea. India's industry was created in the 1830s when the East India Company planted Assam to break China's monopoly, and Assam and West Bengal still supply most of an output that India also mostly drinks. Sri Lanka's tea replaced a coffee industry that leaf rust destroyed after 1869. Kenya's crop began as an experimental planting in 1903 and became a major industry only after smallholders were allowed in, which is why Kenya now grows 8.2% of world output on a mixture of estates and half a million small farms.

Growth has been fast and uneven. 47 countries reported production in 2024, and everything outside the top ten came to only 5.1%. World output changed +37% over the ten years to 2024, driven mostly by China at +5.5% a year and by African origins: Uganda grew at +3.9% and Rwanda at +4%, while Sri Lanka contracted at -1.8%.

Production and export rankings diverge more sharply for tea than for almost any other soft commodity, because the largest producer barely exports. In 2024 the leading exporter of tea (HS 0902) was Kenya with 18% of the world's $7.6 billion in export value, level with Sri Lanka on 18%, then China (17%) and India (11%) (CEPII BACI). Kenya and Sri Lanka export almost everything they make; China and India drink almost everything they make. Narrow the lens to bulk black tea in packages over three kilograms (HS 090240), the leaf that actually moves through the auctions, and the concentration is starker still: Kenya alone accounted for 37% of that $3.6 billion trade in 2024, ahead of India and 18% for Sri Lanka.

The buyers are drinking nations rather than rich ones. Pakistan was the largest importer in 2024 with 8.2% of the world's $7.6 billion, followed by United States (7.6%), United Kingdom (5%), United Arab Emirates (4.9%) and Russia (4.6%) (CEPII BACI). Several of the names on both lists are re-exporters that grow nothing: the United Arab Emirates blends and re-ships through Dubai, Poland and Germany pack tea for the European market, and the United Kingdom imports bulk leaf, blends it and sends part of it out again. Reading the two tables together separates the three trades in tea: leaf leaving the farm, bulk tea moving to a blending hall, and branded packets moving to a supermarket.

Tea has no futures market. There is no contract to hedge, no clearing house and no screen price, and that single fact shapes everything about how the trade works. Tea is sold instead at physical auctions held weekly in the producing countries, plus a growing volume of private treaty and direct sales between estates and packers. The auction centers that matter are Mombasa for Kenya and most of East Africa, Colombo for Sri Lanka, and Kolkata, Guwahati, Coimbatore and Coonoor for India, with smaller centers in Chittagong, Jakarta, Limbe and Nairobi. Each works the same way: producers consign lots to a licensed broker, the broker circulates a catalogue and samples about a fortnight ahead, buyers taste and value every lot, and the lots are sold by open outcry or on an electronic platform to the highest bidder. Price is per kilogram, and each lot clears on its own merits, which is why an auction average conceals an enormous spread between the best and worst leaf sold on the same day.

The World Bank series used here is Average of three auctions, which blends the three main centers. It stood at $2.91/kg in August 2026, down 4% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). Its nominal record was $3.37/kg in August 2022, but in inflation-adjusted terms the real high was $15.06/kg in April 1977; the lowest monthly average since the series began in 1960 was $0.71/kg in November 1972. The three centers do not move together. In August 2026 the Colombo auction, Sri Lanka was $3.61/kg, -9% from a year earlier, the Kolkata auction, India was $2.85/kg (-5%) and the Mombasa auction, Kenya was $2.25/kg (+5%). Colombo usually sits at a premium because Ceylon orthodox leaf is bought for character; Mombasa usually sits at a discount because its CTC leaf is bought in bulk for blending.

Three ambiguities are worth stating plainly. First, auction prices are for made tea, dried and graded, quoted in dollars per kilogram, while the production table on this page counts fresh green leaf. Second, the auction average is not a world price: it covers the black tea that passes through three salerooms, and it says almost nothing about the green tea that China grows and drinks, which never crosses an auction floor. Third, an increasing share of tea is sold direct from estate to packer at negotiated prices that are never published, so the auction is a reference for a market it no longer entirely contains.

Kenya supplies the bulk of the black tea that clears at Mombasa, and its bushes are almost entirely rain-fed. The long rains from March to May and the short rains from October to December set how much leaf is plucked, and a failed season cuts volumes at auction within weeks because tea has no storage buffer between bush and saleroom. Frost and hail on the high fields do the same thing faster. Because Kenyan leaf sets the price of the blending grades, its weather moves the world average.

Each auction lot is priced on its own, so the published average moves when the composition of what is offered changes, not only when demand changes. A flush of coarse rainy-season leaf drags the average down even if the best lots hold their value; a short crop of fine leaf lifts it. Buyers also refuse lots, and unsold percentages at Mombasa and Colombo are watched as a measure of whether packers think prices are too high.

Tea is quoted in dollars while wages, fertilizer and fuel are paid in shillings, rupees and taka. When the Kenyan shilling or the Sri Lankan rupee weakens, growers receive more local currency for the same dollar bid and can afford to sell more, which tends to push the dollar auction price down over the following months. A strengthening producer currency does the reverse and can make estates hold leaf back rather than accept a low bid.

Tea yield responds directly to nitrogen, and the crop is fertilizer-hungry by the standards of a perennial. When urea and ammonium sulfate prices rise, smallholders cut application rates and yields fall a season later. Factory costs move the same way: withering troughs, dryers and CTC rollers run on electricity and firewood or furnace oil, so an energy shock raises the cost of turning green leaf into made tea and squeezes the margin between farm-gate and auction price.

The largest tea importers are middle-income countries whose purchases depend on foreign exchange availability as much as on taste. When Pakistan, Egypt or Iraq face a currency shortage or restrict letters of credit, orders at Mombasa thin out immediately; when Russian or Middle Eastern demand returns, the same grades clear at a premium. Because a handful of destinations take much of the bulk trade, a payments problem in one of them is a market event.

Colombo prices are unusually sensitive to domestic policy because Sri Lanka's estates operate on thin margins and export nearly all their output. The 2021 ban on imported agrochemicals cut yields sharply and lifted Colombo quotations even as volumes fell, a reminder that the auction price and the value of the crop can move in opposite directions. Wage settlements on the estates and fuel subsidies have similar effects on cost and on how much leaf is plucked.

Large packers buy to a recipe and a price, not to an origin. If Mombasa CTC becomes expensive relative to Indian, Ugandan, Malawian or Rwandan leaf, blenders shift their buying and the spread between auctions narrows. This substitution caps how far any single center can rally while the others are well supplied, and it is why the three-auction average is a more stable indicator than any one saleroom.

Most bulk tea sold to European and North American packers now carries a certification, and audit, traceability and compliance costs sit on top of the auction price. Certification requirements change what a factory must document about wages, agrochemicals and land use, which raises the cost of the marginal lot from a small grower. The effect is not on the headline price so much as on which producers can reach which buyers.

Tea is picked, not harvested. Skilled pluckers take the bud and the top two leaves of each new shoot, which is where the flavor and caffeine concentrate, and a bush is plucked every seven to fourteen days through the growing season for decades. In Assam and East Africa the plucking round runs almost year-round with peaks after the rains; Darjeeling has distinct flushes, the first in spring and the more valuable second flush in early summer; China's best green teas are picked in a narrow window before the spring rains. Green leaf is perishable, so it must reach a factory within a few hours, which is why processing sits in the middle of the fields rather than at a port.

Black tea is made in four steps. Withering spreads the leaf in troughs under moving air for ten to eighteen hours to remove much of its water and soften it. Disruption breaks the cells and releases the enzymes: the orthodox method rolls whole leaf on a rolling table to keep it intact, while the CTC method, crush, tear and curl, invented in 1930, passes leaf through counter-rotating toothed rollers to produce small hard particles that brew fast and strong. Oxidation then runs for one to three hours in a warm, humid room, turning colorless catechins into the theaflavins and thearubigins that give black tea its color and body. Firing in a hot-air dryer stops oxidation and takes the moisture down to a few percent, and the tea is then sorted by particle size into grades: broken pekoe, pekoe fannings, pekoe dust and dust for CTC, or orange pekoe and flowery broken orange pekoe for orthodox.

Green tea skips oxidation. The leaf is fixed immediately after plucking, by steaming in Japan or pan-firing in China, which deactivates the enzymes before they can work, then rolled and dried. Oolong is partly oxidized and stopped part-way; white tea is simply withered and dried; and dark teas such as pu-erh are fermented by microbes over months or years. The yield ratio is roughly constant across methods: about four to five kilograms of fresh leaf make one kilogram of made tea, so a factory handling a hundred tonnes of green leaf a day is a modest operation by weight and a large one by value.

By-products are minor. Tea waste and fannings go into instant tea and tea bags, prunings are returned to the soil, and spent leaf is composted or burned. Made tea keeps for a year or more if it is dry and sealed, which is what makes an auction system workable: the leaf can wait a fortnight for a catalogue and several weeks more for a ship without losing much value.

Almost all tea is drunk. Black tea dominates the traded market and goes into blends, tea bags and the strong milk teas of South Asia, the Middle East and East Africa. Green tea dominates Chinese and Japanese domestic consumption. Beyond leaf tea, the largest processed outlet is instant or soluble tea, made by extracting brewed liquor and spray-drying it, which absorbs a lot of low-grade fannings and dust, and ready-to-drink bottled tea, which has grown fastest in East Asia and North America.

Non-beverage uses are small. Tea extracts are sold for their polyphenols into supplements and cosmetics, decaffeination yields caffeine as a saleable by-product, and tea seed oil is pressed in parts of China. The FAO Intergovernmental Group on Tea, which is the body that tracks the market, reports consumption in made-tea terms, so any comparison with the green leaf production figures on this page needs the conversion applied first.

The tea chain is unusual because the first processing step cannot be moved. Green leaf wilts within hours, so every producing region has factories inside the fields, and ownership of those factories decides who captures value. In Kenya the smallholder crop runs through factories owned by the growers through the Kenya Tea Development Agency, which is why so much of the crop reaches Mombasa as a standardized CTC product. In Assam and Sri Lanka the estate and its factory are usually the same business. From the factory, made tea moves in paper sacks or foil-lined bulk packs to a warehouse near the auction center, where brokers draw samples for the catalogue.

Mombasa is the pivot of the African trade and the largest black tea auction by volume, drawing leaf from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi and Mozambique, much of it by road along the Northern Corridor. Colombo handles Sri Lanka's orthodox crop and is the oldest continuously running center, first held in 1883. Kolkata, Guwahati and the southern Indian centers handle India's. Once sold, tea moves in containers to blending and packing plants: Dubai for the Middle East and Africa, the United Kingdom and Poland for Europe, Egypt and Pakistan for their own markets. A packet on a European shelf typically contains leaf from several origins bought at several auctions weeks apart.

The chokepoints are inland and administrative rather than maritime. Mombasa port and the road and rail links behind it carry nearly all of East Africa's tea, and congestion there delays catalogues rather than merely cargoes. Kenya's auction depends on a functioning warehouse and broker system in a single city. Sri Lanka's crop leaves through Colombo alone. For Europe-bound tea the Suez route matters, since a diversion around the Cape adds weeks to a low-value, high-volume cargo. The concentration that matters most, though, is commercial: a small number of multinational packers buy a large share of the bulk grades sold at Mombasa and Colombo, so their buying decisions set the clearing price for hundreds of thousands of smallholders.