How tea pickers are absorbing climate losses before markets notice
Environment & Climate
By
Mactilda Mbenywe
| May 26, 2026
A tea farmer on a farm in Murang’a County. [File, Standard]
At dawn, John, 60, and his wife Rose, 57, walk a short dirt track to their patch of farmland on a precipitously steep hillside in Kenya’s central highlands.
They spend the day picking two leaves and a bud from their tea bushes, filling baskets on their backs, then emptying them into a sack to be sold. Repeat until sundown.
They have done this for nearly three decades. But the arithmetic of survival is getting harder.
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Last year, the couple earned Sh 135,000 from the production, plus another Sh130,000 from honey and avocado sales. That is about half Kenya’s average salary. Spread across 12 family members, including five children and seven grandchildren, it works out to around Sh35 per person per day.
“We can afford enough food, but at times we have had to take out loans to pay for education,” Rose told The Standard. “Three years ago, we had to sell our cow, which meant we could not consume milk and also reduced our income even further”
John and Rose are not anormal pair. They are the face of a quiet crisis unfolding across Kenya’s tea-growing highlands, one where climate change is already being paid for, in full, by the people who pick the leaves. And the global tea market has not yet noticed.
Kenya is the world’s largest exporter of black tea. The sector supports over one million livelihoods directly, with women making up more than 60 per cent of the workforce.
Tea production is concentrated west of the Rift Valley, Kericho, Bomet, Kisii and Nandi counties, with significant smallholder production in central regions like Murang’a, Nyeri and Meru.
The Tea Board of Kenya’s performance report shows production in February 2026 dropped by 16.27 per cent compared to February 2025, from 44.61 million kilogrammes to 37.35 million kilogrammes.
Report attributes this to: “hot and dry weather conditions experienced throughout the country”.
The decline hit smallholder farmers hardest. The Smallholder Sub-sector under the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA), which has wide coverage east of the Rift, recorded a production decline of 22.08 per cent. Estates recorded an 11.23 percent decline.
However, the official data does not capture fact that tea pickers are not salaried employees. Most are paid per kilogramme plucked. When yields drop, daily wages drop by the same proportion in a steady, automatic and without any negotiation or safety net.
Investigations reveal that tea pickers are losing between Sh650 and 1,000 a day in wages, an estimated 20 to 30 percent cut in income. For a picker working 20 days a month, that translates to Sh13,000 - 21,000 in lost monthly earnings.
Meanwhile, tea export prices have remained steady. Data from the Mombasa Tea Auction shows that the average price in November 2025 rose slightly to about Sh295 per kilo, a 1.5 per cent increase compared to the same period of the previous year.
The global tea market has not adjusted. The loss never appears on corporate ledgers. It appears as empty plates, unpaid school fees and land sales in Kericho’s households.
When you ask any tea farmer about the weather and you will hear the same story.
Benard Koskei, 70, a tea farmer from Kericho, said, “Climate change poses a real threat to us. We cannot predict seasons any more, temperatures are rising, rainfall is more erratic, more often accompanied by unusual hailstones and longer droughts, which was not the case in the past.
“If this continues, then it will make growing tea much harder and life for us extremely difficult”.
The data backs him up. IGAD Climate Prediction & Applications Centre weekly forecast for May 2026 confirms the pattern: exceptional rainfall expected over western Kenya, but also less-than-usual rainfall over other parts. This volatility , not just drought or flood alone, is the new reality.
The Kenyan Meteorological Department warned farmers in early April 2026 that the long rains would be “significantly suppressed” during the first half of the month, only improving toward the end. Farmers who planted too early risked losing their crops entirely.
“Farmers should align planting with the improving rains, weed crops, ensure good drainage in wetter areas and practice water conservation in drier regions,” Kenya Met advised .
For tea farmers, whose bushes are perennial, “aligning planting” is not an option. They can only watch and absorb.
Across the Gatanguru Tea Factory an 8,000-member farmer cooperative in Murang’a county, extreme weather caused production to fall from 24 million tonnes of tea in 2023/24 to 17 million tonnes in 2024/25, according to factory manager Nancy Githaiga.
“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,” Githaiga said.
Tea pickers and smallholder farmers are absorbing climate losses in ways that do not appear in any official statistics.
When John and Rose sold their cow three years ago, it was a distress sale, a productive asset converted to cash for survival.
“We can afford enough food,” Rose said carefully. The qualification “enough” speaks volumes.
For families living on Sh 35 per person per day, “enough” means the minimum caloric intake to keep picking. It does not mean nutritious food. It does not mean three meals a day.
The cold, wet conditions that come with erratic rainfall are taking a physical toll on ageing pickers. John and Rose both suffer from joint pain and respiratory problems. “We can't take medicine for the joint pains, which helps the pain to subside for a time, but it then comes back,” Rose said.
Experts are raising questions over why Kenyan tea production is declining and pickers are earning less, yet global tea prices have not seen a sharp increase.
Climate change is disrupting tea harvests in Kenya through erratic rainfalls, prolonged dry spells and rising temperatures.
But global tea prices are shaped by many other forces beyond weather shocks in East Africa, including fuel and shipping costs, currency fluctuations, stock levels, stock levels and demand from major buyers such as the UK, Pakistan and Egypt.
Buyers also source tea from countries like India, China and Sri Lanka, helping customers in the global market from supply shocks in Kenya.
At the same time, high unemployment in rural Kenya means there is still a steady supply of labour willing to work despite falling earnings.
This has reduced pressure on tea estates and factories to increase wages, even as climate impacts continue to squeeze production and household incomes. Experts warn the real crisis may emerge when pickers can no longer absorb the losses.
They observe that casual labourers begin to stop showing up when effective wages fall below survival levels and some factories are already reporting labour shortages linked to this pressure.
Antony Kariuki Agroforestry and Watershed Specialist warn that when tea-farming households struggle to afford basic food like maize and beans, it signals a deeper breakdown in the system sustaining one of Kenya’s key export crops.
“Once these warning signs intensify, global tea prices are expected to adjust, but by then the cost will already have been absorbed by the pickers themselves,” Kariuki said.
Koskei said, “Farmers like us are bearing the brunt of this crisis, but we aren’t the ones that have caused it. We, small-scale farmers, can't fix this problem ourselves.”
Climate change is expected to reduce optimal growing conditions for tea in Kenya by 26 per cent by 2050. Areas with only average conditions will see production fall by 39 per cent.
The Christian Aid report that contained these projections was released in 2021. Five years later, the crisis is no longer a projection, it is a daily reality.
According to the report, the global tea trade has a structural feature: climate risk is automatically transferred to workers through piece-rate wages. No contract negotiation. No risk-sharing mechanism. No insurance. Just lower daily pay when the rains do not come, or come too hard, or come at the wrong time.
As John contemplates the future, his biggest hope is for his children to leave tea farming entirely. “I would just love it if my children could do something different,” he said. “Farming is just so difficult. There is so much struggle.”