Steamy secrets: Mridula Ramesh writes on lessons to be learnt from tea

Reality #2: It is also trying to steal trade secrets from the other country.

Reality #3: An opioid epidemic is raging.

This isn’t America-and-China today; it’s actually Britain-and-China, in the 18th and 19th centuries. And the object at the heart of it all: Tea.

When Catherine of Braganza wed Charles II in 1662, she introduced tea into the English court. What started as a royal indulgence soon cascaded through aristocratic households. Caffeine colonised England in different ways. Coffee, as we saw in an earlier column, was consumed in coffee houses, sparking intellectual debate among men, but tea… tea was feminine, consumed in a leisurely upper-class ritual.

By 1706, Thomas Twining had bought Tom’s Coffee House in London and started selling readymade tea alongside coffee, and then tea leaves to upper-class households. Meanwhile, the British East India Company (EIC), reeling from the 1720 ban on textile imports, stepped up imports of commodities such as raw cotton, sugar and tea. (Incidentally, Indian sugar was the world’s first fair-trade product, marketed as such because it was produced without slave labour.)

High taxes and the EIC monopoly kept tea prices so high that they fomented colonial resentment, which erupted as the Boston Tea Party, when American revolutionaries boarded British ships in the Boston Harbor in 1773 and dumped 342 chests of tea into the sea. It was a protest against high taxes set by a parliament that contained no representation from the colonies.

A few years later, Britain finally slashed taxes, turning tea into a staple. The English love of tea, however, led to a massive drain of silver to China, which was then the world’s sole supplier. To address this, EIC used two approaches.

First, it forced more “even” terms of trade by flooding China with Indian opium. As Bengal’s opium production grew (revenues soared 52-fold between 1791 and 1840), prices collapsed, turning the drug from an elite luxury into a mass product that devastated Chinese society. Chinese appeals to end the trade fell on deaf years. In fact, punitive action against drug dealers only led to war.

In the second approach, the Company sent a botanist, Robert Fortune, to steal China’s secrets. As journalist Sarah Rose writes in her 2009 book, For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula for the World’s Favourite Drink, “Tea met all the definitions of intellectual property: it was a product of high commercial value, manufactured using a formula and process unique to China, which China protected fiercely, and which also gave China a vast advantage over its competitors.”

And so, the Scotsman Fortune ventured forth to steal tea for England, with innovation laced into his guile. He relied on sealed, portable terrariums called Wardian cases (invented by the English doctor Nathaniel Ward) to transport thousands of plants and seeds from the highlands of China to the mountains of India.

“The Himalayas provide perfect terroir for tea, as if God had always intended it to grow there,” Rose writes. Here’s why: The tea plant (really a tree) needs well-drained soils such as that found on mountain slopes, a cool climate, seasonal rainfall, and not too much sun. Precisely the conditions found in China (where the Camellia sinensis sinensis comes from) and Assam (birthplace of the Camellia sinensis assamica).

Over time, Fortune’s Chinese tea was interbred with the Assamese variety to birth some of the variants we drink today. Darjeeling tea is essentially the Chinese variety, Assam tea is the Assamese variant, and English Breakfast is a mixture of teas, leaning more on the latter.

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Plucking tea is hard work. Only the top two leaves and bud (with the most polyphenols and amino acids) are used for premium grades. Even with more leaves plucked for lower grades of tea, the average worker can only harvest about 30 kg to 50 kg of fresh leaves daily, amounting to only 6 kg to 10 kg of black tea. This fuelled massive historical migrations for plantation work, leaving behind significant and lasting demographic scars.

Tea took root in India, expanding through plantations in the Nilgiris and Sri Lanka (where a fungus had decimated coffee plantations) and transforming natural ecosystems across subcontinental highlands.

“In the 1860s and ’70s, the upper plateau of the district was largely covered in forest – grassland and shola. Coffee was the main crop. Exotics such as eucalyptus and acacias were just coming in. Tea existed only in the fringes. Hunters were fighting for the preservation of forests while planters, who were slowly getting better-organised, wanted more land to plant,” says Vaibhav Ramani, a PhD scholar at Ashoka University researching the environmental history of this region.

In the following decades, disease and low coffee prices pushed more planters to tea. Steadily, grasslands and sholas ceded ground to new plantations. After World War 2 came chemicalisation, with pesticides and DDT first hailed as miracles and later feared as poisons. By 1950, tea had decisively overtaken coffee. Look at satellite views of the region today and one sees how the forest has been supplanted by plantations (and urban sprawl).

One visible symptom of this takeover: rising human-animal conflict, with Gudalur in Tamil Nadu now a hotspot of elephant encounters. Do we make way, or should they?

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What is the point of this history lesson?

First, nations have always used bans and taxes in attempts to even out trade imbalances, and today’s actions are no different. Such measures can profoundly reshape the world in unexpected ways for decades, if not centuries.

Second, markets are a powerful, enduring force that spur innovation in the quest for lower prices, but they tend to neglect or abuse what is not priced.

Thus, our biggest policy failure today is failing to adequately price nature’s ecosystem services, especially water, biodiversity and soil carbon.

Tea has other lessons to offer too, particularly in an era of oversupply.

Wherever tea arrived, it was initially seen as a medicine. As British prime minister William Gladstone put it: “If you are cold, tea will warm you; if you are heated, it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you; if you are excited, it will calm you.”

He was onto something. Tea is a rich source of polyphenols (EGCG in green tea; theaflavins in black tea). These plant compounds are powerful antioxidants that help reduce inflammation and protect both cells and organ systems such as the brain.

Tea’s mental-health benefits are indeed substantial. A long-term study found that drinking at least half a cup of green tea daily was associated with a lower risk of depression and dementia. In another experiment, healthy men given black tea recovered faster from stress, showed lower cortisol levels, and reported greater relaxation than those who drank an indistinguishable caffeinated placebo. Yet another report showed that EGCG boosted brainwaves while leaving people calmer.

Tea may protect against cancer. Cell culture and animal studies strongly support this, and while epidemiological and human studies remain less conclusive, one study of 164,000 Chinese men found that regular green-tea consumption was associated with an 8% to 21% lower risk of cancer-related death. Another large European study found that men drinking more tea — peaking at three cups daily — saw lower mortality from cancer, heart attacks and indeed all causes, especially when they also drank coffee.

Well-controlled large human studies could lead to stronger prescriptions. Sadly, scientists believe that inexpensive fixes like green tea are too cheap to justify the high costs of such research, with funding allotted instead to potentially exorbitant cancer treatments.

With the evidence in hand, could Indians, grappling with mental health, metabolic and cancer crises, simply include more green tea in their daily lives? Would this work in the land of masala chai and black tea?

Maybe. Consider that the tradition of afternoon tea only arrived with British women visiting India in search of English husbands. The Tea Association, dealing with rising supply, then saw the potential of the Indian market and began to actively promote their product, first at railway stations, then by instituting the now-ubiquitous “tea break”, in factories and offices.

So, we can be nudged. I have recently added two cups of green tea to my black coffee and tea regimen.

There is the climate to consider too.

Assam, the largest producer of Indian tea, is experiencing hotter and drier weather, punctuated by torrential downpours. Without plant roots or artificial restraints, intense rains wash away topsoil, leaving the land degraded. The changing climate, deforestation and poor soil health are now intensifying pest attacks like the devastating greenfly infestation, which can halve yields in affected plantations. Worryingly, many pests are becoming resistant to conventional pesticides.

Adapting to this change requires a variety of approaches: catching pest attacks early, targeted plucking and pruning, biopesticides and biological pest control, and shade forestry to buffer against climate volatility and improve biodiversity and soil health (which also helps stabilise soil during intense downpours).

“Going organic brings higher prices,” says Karthik Jayaraman of Havukal, an exporter of organic tea. However, as he points out, low domestic demand, sharply reduced yields (just consider Sri Lanka’s tea harvest collapse after attempts to go organic) and rising labour costs currently make this shift challenging. Import taxes and fertiliser subsidies further muddy incentives.

What would really move the needle, in this era of oversupply, is giving elements such as water, biodiversity and soil and biomass carbon a market price. Such pricing would help farmers navigate the trade-offs of whether to go organic, switch to shade-coffee or indeed rewild, in a way that balanced all interests, including those of natural ecosystems.

Failing this, we spiral into a world in which the decision is forced upon us.

(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on tradeoffs@climaction.net. The views expressed are personal)