EP1683 Part 3 of 5 | Why Tea Farmers Are Under Increasing Pressure (Jem McDowall) Map It Forward

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Episode Description

This is part 3 of a new 5-part series on The Daily Coffee Pro Podcast by Map It Forward, hosted by Lee Safar. Our guest on the podcast for this series is Jem McDowall, VP at Universal Commodities.

In this episode, Lee and Jem examine the growing challenges facing tea farmers and producers around the world.

Jem explains why the health of the producer base matters to everyone downstream: without financially viable producers, there is no tea industry.

The conversation explores how tea producers have spent roughly a decade dealing with low prices while input costs have continued to rise. Jem explains how efforts to increase productivity and expand tea planting contributed to oversupply in some markets, putting further downward pressure on prices.

The result has been years of cost cutting, reduced investment, lower inputs, weaker balance sheets, and declining resilience across parts of the producer base.

Jem points to producing origins that have seen significant declines in output and warns that even if tea prices temporarily rise, a short-term price spike cannot repair years of underinvestment.

Lee and Jem also discuss the growing climate risk facing agriculture, including El Niño, drought, flooding, and increasingly volatile weather patterns.

That leads to one of the strongest comparisons in the series: Jem describes coffee as a kind of “canary in the coal mine” for tea. Many of the problems now emerging in tea — climate stress, falling production, financial pressure, and farmers walking away — have already been visible in coffee.

The conversation also explores currency risk, rising dollar-denominated input costs, de-dollarization, and the structure of smallholder tea production.

Jem explains that around 65% of tea is grown by small farmers, making tea far more fragmented at origin than many people might assume.

This episode raises a fundamental question for both tea and coffee: how long can agricultural supply chains continue weakening the people responsible for producing the product?

Connect with Jem McDowall here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jem-mcdowall-826932b/

Universal Commodities:

https://uctt.com/

If you found this episode valuable, make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast and follow along for the rest of this 5-part series.

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