One of the places that I visit every time I come to Uganda is the vocational college set up by John Nj which is situated in rural Mityana, about 2 hour drive northwest(ish) from Kampala.
The area is renowned for its tea plantations, and once you leave the tarmac road and enter the properly rural area, the fields on either side are a vibrant green as far as the eye can see, full of tea bushes, and interspersed with groves of trees, often eucalyptus as they grow quickly to keep providing the fuel for the drying machines in the factories.
Tea workers will be seen in the fields, clipping the leaves and throwing them into the big baskets that they wear on their backs as fast as they can – they are paid by the basket load, so the more they pick, the more they earn. And every now and then there is a factory and workers houses. It’s mainly just the drying and sorting stages of the process that are done in Uganda, so the factory isn’t huge. And the workers ‘cottages’ are very basic, not even running water or electricity for most, but all are situated together in a sort of little community, with a borehole nearby.
The lack of production process that occurs in Uganda has an impact on the amount of money that Uganda makes from tea exports. There isn’t a lot of mark up on the basic tealeaves – that is made by the big brands when they do the final stages of the process. So it’s not the most lucrative of incomes, but it has been present for many years, and it has always seemed to be a given part of Uganda’s export economy.
But, in the past couple of years, I’ve noticed that the amount of land that was once given to tea is reducing. Where once it was all tea bushes, now there are swathes of it that have been dug up and are being rented out to farmers to grow other cash crops – maize seems to be particularly popular. Trees are also being chopped down and not replaced. I asked John about this, and he said that the tea companies are struggling to sell their tea as the market seems to have shrunk, and so in order to pay their workers, they have had to rent out some of their land to diversify their income stream.
Some of the workers cottages have also been left to disintegrate, as the number of workers that the tea companies need has reduced, and I came across one little area that felt so sad and abandoned with only a couple of homes that still seemed to have anyone living in them.
We wondered about the background to the shrinking of the market, and what might be causing it. I reflected on the massive increase in coffee shops that can be found in UK high streets, and the upsurge in the coffee culture generally. In Thornbury alone there are at least 10 such places, and that’s not a very big town. Presumably this is being accompanied by a decrease in the number of cups of tea being drunk (although I do have a few family members who are doing their best to keep the industry afloat between them!!!!).
There will still be some parts of the world where tea wins against coffee – but I suspect those countries grow their own tea so don’t need to import from Uganda. Certainly, Uganda has its own share of tea drinkers, and so some of its tea is for home use. But here also the coffee shop culture is growing, and the middle classes are often preferring the draw of a flat white or a latte to the traditional African tea. As I walk through the plantations and note the increased ratio of maize to tea within the tea plantation boundaries, it brings home to me the impact that the growth in coffee culture is having on the lives of individuals hundreds of miles away, most of whom can only dream of ever having enough money to be able to afford the luxury of a ‘double-shot vanilla latte with oat’ or whatever your preferred cuppa happens to be.
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| This field used to be all tea, now the maize is winning! |
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| lots of derelict homes in the tea-workers residential area |
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| the hillside used to be covered in trees to fuel the factory - not any more |
