Planting Hope Acquires Argo Tea Assets | Bangladesh Opens Panchagarh Tea Auction Center | Coffee Overtakes Tea Consumption in the UK

HEAR THE HEADLINES – Planting Hope Acquires Argo Tea Assets | Foodtech Venture Will Market Tea and Veggies to College Students | Bangladesh Opens a Third Tea Auction Center | Coffee Overtakes Tea Consumption in the UK

| NEWSMAKER – Sabita Banerji, Founder and CEO THIRST, The International Roundtable for Sustainable Tea

| FEATURE INTRO – THIRST founder and CEO Sabita Banerji is overseeing a three-year human rights impact assessment of the tea industry. In August, she toured Kenya and Tanzania, seeking examples of innovative alternative approaches to better understand how tea workers and farmers see the future of tea. She joins Tea Biz from Oxford, England, to share insights from her travels.

Alternate Models Emerge as Tea Smallholders Aggregate – Control distributed amongst its elements makes for a much more powerful, stronger, sustainable, and more efficient entity, says THIRST CEO Sabita Banerji.

“I've seen some very good plantations in my travels, in India, in Tanzania, in Kenya, and I'm sure there are others in many other countries as well. But at the end of the day, a plantation is still a plantation, and the workers are still in that large entity,” says Banerji.

“I think that an alternative model of smallholder farmers sort of aggregating is starting to emerge in Tanzania and Kenya, where I've visited many different smallholder farms and a few plantations,” she said. “Just comparing the two, the difference between how a tea plantation worker lives and how a smallholder farmer lives are really quite significant.

“I think this model will gradually replace plantations in the long run,” she said.

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