The Tea Trail with Simon Reeve This World

A lovely cup of tea - what could be more British?

We drink millions of cups of the stuff every day.

But how much do we know about where it really comes from?

I'm travelling more than 1,000 miles across East Africa

to meet the people who supply us with our national drink.

Behind each cup is an army

of pickers, packers, growers and truckers.

Is that...

Sam, you just missed the basket!

Tea's a massive industry employing millions of people

but, as I travel the tea trail,

I find a darker side to many of their lives.

There is a real edge to this place.

A tea plantation worker, it's a tough life.

My journey takes me across East Africa's vast tea-growing region,

through a land that's been transformed.

Look at this.

Tea!

What more evidence could you have of a changing world?

I'm sitting here, I've got a mug of tea and a chapati.

I'm following the tea trail.

My journey starts on the coast of Kenya,

in the port city of Mombasa.

For centuries, it was known as a trading centre

for slaves, gold and spices.

The reason I'm starting my journey here rather than in India,

where huge quantities of tea is still grown,

or China, where tea originates from,

is because East Africa is where most of the tea we drink in Britain

actually comes from.

Mombasa is now one of the world's main hubs for the global tea trade.

More than half the tea we drink in Britain,

our breakfast teabags, our builders' tea,

comes from East Africa and it comes through this city.

It's known as black tea.

Can I join you, gentlemen?

The locals love it, too.

Just over here, this is Mama Asha.

She is the woman who keeps the market going

by providing all the stallholders with copious quantities of tea.

I'm going to start as I mean to go on and have a cup.

Thank you, Mama Asha.

Have you ever seen such a thing?

Hot tea into a plastic bag.

And that's a takeaway tea?

This city has played a vital role

in the story of our precious British cuppa.

There's a reason that Mombasa is the centre of the Kenyan tea trade

and it's in a room up here. It's the auction...

Well, it's the most important auction for black tea in the world.

-225?

-220.

290. Any better?

Tea from nine East African countries is sold here,

making Kenya the world's biggest tea exporter.

There's some serious business going on here.

Charles Kibandi is a tea broker who sells it every week.

How much money are you hoping to make from your tea today?

-Have you got any... Can you give us an idea?

-A figure?

-Mm.

I'll be happy if I can get up to 2 million.

-2 million?

-Yes.

The whole auction today has about seven million kilos of tea on offer.

If you take an average of about 2.50, you're talking...

What? About 17 million.

Right.

Representatives of most of our big supermarkets are here in the room.

We have a bid in.

225?

A third of all the tea we drink in the UK

is bought and sold at this auction.,

tens of thousands of tonnes of the stuff.

There are rules, there's protocols,

there's a language that they use

that's pretty impenetrable to me as an outsider,

but, make no mistake, what happens here involves vast sums of money

and has a direct impact on what you pay for a pack of tea

in a supermarket in Britain.

BROKERS SHOUT

I'm out. I'm out.

Once it's sold at auction, our tea is shipped out of Mombasa,

East Africa's biggest port.

Around half a million tonnes of black tea

is exported from here every year.

This has already been loaded

with dozens of shipping containers packed with tea.

These anonymous boxes would soon arrive in Britain.

Like so much of our stuff, we know so little about where it comes from.

This is really the end of a funnel, almost,

that brings tea from across East Africa here to the port.

In many ways, it's the end of the line.

We need to head back up that line, up that road,

to find out where it's come from.

Following the tea trail to find out

would take me on a journey across East Africa's tea-growing region.

Tea isn't actually grown anywhere near Mombasa.

It's far too dry around here.

In fact, most of Kenya is far too dry.

To get to any of the major tea-growing areas,

I need to head inland and uphill,

and I'm going to take a train.

Hello, sir. Jambo.

Thank you.

I do love travelling by train

but I have got a slightly sinking feeling about this one

because it just looks like a train that perhaps might not leave

or even arrive on time.

It doesn't also help that its nickname is the Lunatic Line.

Oh.

Hey! Oh... This is...

Yeah. No, that's OK.

This is me.

A little sink.

It claims to have drinking water.

Some sort of air conditioning.

All right.

It's a line that's down on its luck,

but I'm sure it'll get us there eventually.

A couple of hours late, we started to roll.

-Bye-bye.

-Bye!

The train trundles along reassuringly slowly.

Apparently, it avoids the risk of derailment,

which has been a problem in the past.

Anyway, I've got some bedding.

It is going to be a long night, I think.

That's not too bad.

See you in the morning.

It's a bit neglected today,

but this railway played a central role in the story of our tea.

The line was built by the British

as a colonial, imperial and strategic project.

It was designed to help the Brits control the region

and enable them to project power towards the heart of Africa.

Eventually, the line stretched all the way from Mombasa to the Nile,

a distance of 580 miles.

It came to be known as the Lunatic Line

because it was prohibitively expensive

but also because a horrifying number of workers died

while it was being built.

More than 2,500.

That's more than four per mile of track.

Most of them died because of accidents

and because of diseases like malaria,

but a large number died because of lion attacks.

The line opened up Kenya to British settlers,

who were encouraged to come out here to colonise and farm the land.

In 1903, one of them brought a packet of tea seeds from India.

It was the beginning of the Kenyan tea industry.

The landscape's changed a bit.

We're just coming into the edge of Nairobi now, the capital.

It seems to be dominated by a shanty town slum, really.

People picking through rubbish by the side of the tracks.

We're going to hop into a car

and head up into the hills.

By the early 1900s, thousands of settlers had moved over here.

And, of course, they were guaranteed,

they were promised land here,

and often they got the very best land, the most fertile land.

Outside Nairobi is what used to be called the White Highlands,

where many British and European settlers established farms.

Fiona Vernon is the granddaughter

of one of Kenya's earliest British settlers.

When did your family come here?

My grandfather came in 1906

and my grandmother then came two years later.

And they were married in Mombasa Cathedral

literally the day she arrived

because he was frightened she might change her mind.

A warm climate and regular rainfall

made the highlands of Kenya ideal for farming tea.

Fiona's family came here from Essex,

drawn by the promise of a new life.

Is it cheeky to ask to see the photo album?

No, do, have a look.

So that's Grandpa.

That's it, the starter of it all.

Fiona's grandfather bought this plot of land from the colonial government

and soon after became Kenya's very first commercial tea grower.

Life as a settler could be tough,

but wasn't without its rewards.

I mean, clearly, here, there is the keeping up of British traditions

and British civilisation in its colonial sense, isn't there?

That's right.

Clearly, they wanted to keep a little bit of the old country.

-Absolutely. This is the original house.

-This is this house here?

The first house was eaten by termites.

Christmas 1922.

On safari, family on safari.

The first XI hockey team.

By the time life had reached your generation,

did you have a first XI hockey team?

Oh, we did.

The British introduced huge tea plantations

and strict, often brutal, colonial rule.

There were some benefits.

The tea industry provided work for thousands of pickers.

The British fought famine and disease

and helped to bring an end to the slave trade

that had blighted the region for centuries.

And, meanwhile, Kenya's tea industry boomed.

By 1946, the area farmed for tea had grown from next to nothing

to more than 16,000 acres.

It gave Fiona's family the means

to maintain a comfortable colonial lifestyle.

Can you imagine your family history without tea?

No.

No.

It's just been the crux of every...

Well, it's kept everything, everybody here. Yeah.

The four girls.

Because my mother was the eldest, so she inherited the farm,

but her sisters were given land as a wedding present,

so it has kept the whole family together.

Do you feel a sense of privilege as a result?

Do you feel like it... Or has it been very hard work?

No, I do. I feel we're very privileged.

We're very blessed. Yeah.

There was a ready market for Kenyan tea back in Britain.

Between 1900 and the 1930s,

consumption almost doubled to 200,000 tonnes a year.

Britain went mad for tea.

But British domination of the African tea trade

couldn't last forever.

In Kenya, the British had seized 7.5 million acres

for white settlers,

driving thousands of Africans out of their homes and off their land.

Discontent with colonial rule had rumbled on for decades.

Finally, it exploded.

In the 1950s, a bloody revolt began against white rule.

The Brits called it the Mau Mau Rebellion.

This cave was one of the places where the so-called Mau Mau fighters

would lay up, hide during the day

and then emerge at night to attack white settlers and white farms.

At one point, apparently,

there were 250 of them in this cave system.

The Mau Mau were guerrilla insurgents

who took up arms against the British.

Wambugu Wa Nyingi was a farm worker who became a political activist.

-TRANSLATION:

-We were fighting for the independence of our country

because we were being exploited by the settlers.

Life for us working on the farms couldn't have been worse.

We all had to work from 5am to 5pm.

Even my own young child had to work.

They worked us like slaves.

The Mau Mau killed hundreds of African tribal leaders

and elders they accused of collaborating

with the British authorities.

White farmers and their families were also murdered.

The British said the Mau Mau were terrorists.

-TRANSLATION:

-We weren't terrorists. We were never anything like that.

They gave us the name Mau Mau.

They wanted to steal the country away from us.

They came here with their rules and their jails.

The British reaction was brutal and ham-fisted.

The army tried to crush the rebels.

It's estimated that between 11,000 and more than 100,000 Kenyans

were killed.

60 British soldiers lost their lives.

British tactics included collective punishment for entire families

and communities suspected of supporting the Mau Mau.

Thousands were detained.

Wambugu was arrested at his home,

held without charge for almost a decade and repeatedly tortured.

-TRANSLATION:

-It was about 10 o'clock in the morning.

We were let out of our cells.

We were told to stand by the roadside in a line.

Then they started beating us.

We were given a terrible beating.

Some men were beaten to death.

I saw two people I shared a cell with beaten to death.

Then, after that, I was beaten.

I was hit from behind on the head.

They hit me so hard, I didn't feel anything else, I just collapsed.

When I woke up, I found myself in a mortuary.

I woke up surrounded by corpses.

Between 1952 and 1960,

tens of thousands of Kenyans were held inside British detention camps.

Often they had no connection to the revolt.

People were subjected to torture, rape and mutilation.

Many died from disease and starvation.

Wobogo's one of a number of Kenyans

who've recently been paid compensation by Britain

for his treatment, but other claims are still outstanding.

The British government has recently expressed regret

for what happened to you.

How do you feel about that?

Are you happy with what they've said. Is it enough?

-TRANSLATION:

-I think it was good for them to say that.

By apologising to us, we felt more human.

We felt like people again.

In 1963, nearly 70 years of colonial rule came to an end

and Kenya became a sovereign nation.

It was hard fought for and hard won,

but, pretty soon after independence, things began to change here

and Kenyans began growing their own tea.

After independence, thousands of Kenyans returned to the highlands

to reclaim land that had been taken from them by the British.

-Oh, here's my friend.

-Samuel?

Oh, welcome to Tennessee Farm. Samuel. Samuel Tibi.

All right, lovely to meet you. I'm Simon.

Samuel Tibi is one of half a million Kenyans

who grow tea on smallholdings of often just a few acres.

You can see the river down below there.

But this is your tea?

This is my tea. This is my farm.

Around five million Kenyans are employed in the tea industry.

The people over there, are they working...

-That's your land over there?

-Working on my farm, they are planting tea.

Let's go and see them.

That's a rucksack? OK.

Growing tea for export to countries like Britain

has helped to transform the lives of Kenyan farmers.

Samuel earns the equivalent of around £7,000 a year,

similar to a teacher's salary in Kenya.

Look at the speed you work!

Then, now picking this one.

Two leaves and a bud.

-Two leaves and a bud?

-Yeah.

I'll go between the two of you.

-All right, so tea... Tea...

-Tea.

This one. Two leaves and a bud, yeah.

OK, good.

I just picked some tea.

Yeah. You can see, beautiful.

I don't know if I'm getting it quite right.

Yeah, yeah, that one, that one, that one, that one, that one. Yeah.

-Bud.

-Yeah, I know that's two.

Yeah, two leaves.

-Two leaves and a bud.

-Yeah.

Two leaves and a bud. Yes.

-OK, two leaves and a bud.

-That makes the best tea.

Sadly, I haven't got the six months

it would take for me to fill this basket.

When you pick, you can see, you do that.

Sa...

Samuel, you just missed the basket!

Most of them went on the floor!

-Did I?

-Yeah, you missed.

Oh, yes, let me try again.

You've spent too much time being the boss!

You need to come out and have a bit more of a lesson out here.

Tea grows so rapidly here in the tropics

that pluckers can harvest leaves from the same bush week after week.

Samuel, do you love these bushes?

I do.

It is the one which I depend on.

But do you come out and do you talk to them at all?

-Oh, yes.

-Hello, my darling bushes.

Oh, yes, I do that.

Almost kissing them!

You should report him to the authorities if he does that, OK?

OK, so we're going to the buying centre.

To the buying centre. Oh, yes.

How often will you take the tea down to the buying centre?

-Every day.

-Every day?

-Every day.

-You don't seem to be carrying anything, Samuel.

-I'm the boss.

-Oh, is that why?

-You are my worker.

We pass through there.

Oh, look at this!

Pickers working on farms all around here

bring their tea to a central collection point

where it's bought by an inspector from the local factory.

I'm number 31, Mr Inspector.

More than a kilo!

1.15? You told me it was only half a kilo!

All this tea, including mine,

went off for processing before being sold on via the Mombasa auction.

You might even be drinking it by now.

I was heading in the opposite direction

because the bulk of Kenya's tea comes from further inland,

close to the border with Uganda.

To get there, I cross the Great Rift Valley.

It stretches 3,600 miles

and splits East Africa in two.

This area is home to one of the most famous tribes on the continent,

the legendary Maasai.

For centuries, they've spurned farming crops

to maintain a nomadic life with their prized cattle,

herding them around East Africa

and living on a diet of milk, meat and cow's blood.

But I'd heard that tea is now playing

an increasingly important role in their lives.

OK, great, we're here.

I'd arrived at a small Maasai homestead

and the ladies in the family had prepared a special welcome.

Hello, ladies!

THEY SING

Lovely to meet you.

I think the idea is that we follow them.

Cups of tea are used in Maasai rituals

and have become part of daily life out here.

Oh, that's great. Thank you very much.

What more evidence could you have of a changing world

than sitting here on the great plains of Africa

with the Maasai tribes-folk,

I've got a mug of tea and a chapati!

It's the little prince.

Now careful, little one!

-Has he got his own tea?

-Mm!

Wow, you're starting them young, aren't you?

He really likes it.

Mm, he likes it.

Traditionally, the Maasai have relied on their cattle

for everything, even using their dung to insulate their homes.

I'm prepared to. I'm Simon.

-Solomon.

-Simon. Solomon is quite close.

I think I am being volunteered here.

There's not a lot left.

A little bit more.

Very kind, madam, show me where.

I'm rubbish at doing the decorating at home.

Where does it need it most?

Whoops.

I think she's a lot better at it than I am.

I have never cow-dunged a home before.

In recent years, the number of cattle owned by this community

has fallen dramatically.

So much so, their entire way of life is now under threat,

as a grandmother who heads this community, Lucy Seleyian, explained.

So the weather, the climate here, is becoming more unpredictable, then?

They'd just endured torrential rains and flooding.

This followed the most severe drought for generations.

Increasingly extreme weather events are a catastrophe

for people across East Africa.

So life is changing dramatically for the Maasai.

What can the Maasai do?

-You're planting tea?

-Yes.

Does it feel to you like you are losing your culture,

your way of life?

Lucy, do you think tea, then, is the future?

Is tea potentially the future for the Maasai?

PHONE RINGS

Hello?

It was a phone call from one of your neighbours saying,

"Who are those strange people with you?"

Some of the Maasai are embracing change,

some of them are being forced to change.

Many have already abandoned their semi-nomadic lifestyles

and started growing tea up in the hills.

And that's where I was going.

We drove on towards the tea highlands

in the west of the country.

Our tea comes back down this road on its way to the port at Mombasa.

It's a journey with a few unusual hazards.

What's this by the road up here?

It's baboons, right on either side of the road, look.

Look! Look!

There's Mum with one... Oh, careful!

Oh, dear.

Oh, that was close.

There's one over here. Look, it's got one on her back, asleep.

As the sun went down, most drivers were getting off the road.

These roads can be dangerous after dark.

There's bandits and hijackers,

so drivers who are trucking tea along the road

or anything else, really,

will pull into a truck stop as the sun goes down.

That's where we're heading to now.

This lorry stop is called Salgaa,

where many drivers who truck our tea pull over for the night.

Thanks, Dixon.

Keep your doors locked, mate.

So, officially, this is a place that doesn't exist.

It doesn't appear on any maps, but the truck stop developed here,

and around the truck stop now is a small town,

but it's a town that's really a bit like the Wild West.

More than 600 lorries will stop here every evening.

Good parking, sir! Good parking!

At night, Salgaa comes alive.

The population swells to nearly 7,000.

A community emerges from the shadows to cater for the drivers' needs.

Oh, there's a real edge to this place.

I went to meet a truck driver.

Anton, can I ask where have you come from and where are you going to?

How long will the whole journey take you? From Congo to Mombasa?

My goodness.

Why do truckers stop here?

The truck drivers transporting our tea stop here for safety.

But there's also an estimated 2,500 prostitutes here as well.

And they're at risk from violence and disease.

It's ten to ten on a Saturday night

and we're heading out with the outreach workers here.

I met up with North Star Alliance,

a charity that provides people here with sexual health care support.

Margaret, let me see what's in the bag.

Let's show the camera. What have we got here?

-I've got condoms.

-And is this what you're doing, then?

You're distributing condoms to the sex workers?

Yes, both sex workers and truck drivers.

And roughly how many will you distribute per night?

1,500 a night.

-Each of you?

-Yes.

-1,500 condoms?

-Yes.

Goodness me.

So, it's quite obvious to me that the ladies here, Margaret here,

they've got a fantastic relationship with the sex workers here,

but, obviously, when we turn up, it's not just me,

there's the TV crew and we've got the camera, as well,

that the ladies are obviously running off

and some of the men are hiding their faces.

The project officer here for North Star Alliance is John Mochama.

-Hello. How are you?

-I'm very well, thank you.

-Welcome.

If you're going to have any intimacy,

you need to be safe.

If you are not protected, don't have sex.

-OK.

-OK.

So then the message is - zip it or use a condom.

And is that a key issue among truck drivers?

Among truck drivers and key populations.

And who are the key populations?

Truck drivers interacting with sex workers.

They spend so many days and months away from their families

and so you find most of them end up

engaging in extramarital affairs.

This is a crucial point.

East Africa has experienced

one of the worst HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world.

More than 1.5 million people are living with HIV in Kenya.

And investigators have realised that infected truck drivers

have played a major role in spreading the disease

throughout the continent.

North Star Alliance now has a network of clinics across Africa,

providing vital health care services

to both truck drivers and prostitutes.

I met up with one sex worker who was prepared to talk openly.

Sandra, is that your name? Sandra? Simon.

Hello.

How long have you been working as a sex worker, Sandra?

-17 years.

-17?

-Yeah.

Why do you do this?

I have children.

I don't have a job.

-Five children?

-Yeah.

How did you become involved in sex work?

How many clients or customers will you see per night

and how much do they usually pay?

I'm quite pleased to be leaving, to be honest.

The people there, individually, were lovely, but the place itself felt...

Well, it was a sad place, really.

There's a lot of suffering there.

A lot of poverty.

And, yet, it's a place that we're connected with.

Our stuff stops there.

The drivers who bring us our tea

find some degree of solace and safety there.

It's an integral part of the tea trail.

Next morning, we were back on the road

and heading towards the heart of the Kenyan tea industry.

Look at the state of the road here.

And you think roads in Britain are bad.

No wonder transporting tea across the country can take weeks.

Ah, this is disintegrating still further.

This narrow road here, this narrow track,

this is currently the main road across Kenya to Uganda.

It's also the main road

to one of the principal tea-growing areas of the country.

Bad roads are part of what holds Africa back.

According to the UN, less than a third of the roads on the continent

are paved.

The result is that huge transport costs

comprise up to three-quarters of the value of African exports.

With low pay and dangerous roads,

truck driving in East Africa is a tough job.

Can we just stop, Dixon?

Thank you.

Look at this.

Tea!

Extending right out to the horizon over there.

I'd reached Kericho,

home to Kenya's biggest tea plantations.

Rich volcanic soil, plenty of sunshine and rain almost every day.

Conditions here are perfect.

The tea grown here is considered to be Kenya's finest.

Which is why, after independence,

several British tea companies stayed on.

The largest, Brooke Bond,

is now part of the giant Anglo-Dutch firm Unilever.

The way things are run here still bears a resemblance

to how it was in colonial times.

Many of the workers and their families live on the estate

where the tea is grown and processed.

Covering 50 square miles,

Unilever's enormous Kericho estate is home to more than 50,000 people.

They grow tea for the world here,

including PG Tips for us.

I am very proud to work and live here in Kericho

and that my home is the place where goodness is born.

Unilever provides vital employment

in an extremely poor part of the country.

Many of their workers get free health care

and education for their families.

Unilever says it pays a basic wage

that's more than twice the national minimum rate.

Nevertheless, some campaigners

claim life for tea plantation workers is difficult.

James Okoth has worked with Kenya's human rights commission

and he campaigns on behalf of plantation workers

across the country.

How would you characterise the life of a tea plantation worker?

A tea plantation worker - it's a tough life.

It's tough because the pay is not enough.

You live from hand to mouth.

Whatever you get is just enough to maybe get your meal

and, because there are not many alternatives,

people are forced to work, yeah.

We asked Unilever if we could visit their Kericho estate.

They said yes, then we got here and they changed their minds.

They said they weren't allowing any filming

in connection with their refreshments category.

But I'd been keen to see the production process

and talk to their employees,

the people who pick our PG Tips.

Unilever didn't want me talking to their workers,

but James managed to arrange a meeting with some pickers.

We've concealed their identities to protect them.

How much do you earn per day?

-TRANSLATION:

-It's hard to know how much I can get in a day.

You get 11 shillings for each kilo of tea you pick.

If you pick ten kilos, you multiply that by 11 shillings.

At the moment, I can pick 15 kilos a day.

12 kilos on a bad day when there's no tea.

So, during the summer, average per kilo, around 15?

-TRANSLATION:

-Around 15 because things are very bad at the moment.

That turns to 160 Kenya shillings.

That's just over one pound.

Unilever told us that, in practice, over a monthly period,

their plantation workers receive a basic wage

more than double that rate

but these women insisted they can't always pick enough

to get the basic wage.

How do you survive?

-TRANSLATION:

-Life is hard.

You try to find enough tea to pick,

but the weather's bad so there's no tea.

Yes, you just have to keep going.

-Do you feel the same?

-Yes.

Most of the tea pickers, as far as I can see, are ladies

and most of the supervisors and bosses appear to be men.

How do they behave towards you?

Are you treated well by male bosses? By the male supervisors?

-TRANSLATION:

-You can get a lot of problems at work.

For example, your supervisor may want to have sex with you.

If you refuse, things will get difficult,

even just getting your tea weighed.

They will find problems with your tea

and those problems are because you refused his advances,

not because of your work.

So your supervisors are demanding sexual favours?

What would happen if you complained about it?

-TRANSLATION:

-Most of the supervisors are relatives of the managers,

so, even if there's a problem with the supervisor,

nothing will be done about it.

Maybe he's the manager's nephew.

You'll be left in the same situation and nothing will be done.

Are these stories common?

Do you hear this from lots of people working on the plantations?

Yes. I talk to many workers, like maybe ten in a month,

from different places, friends,

and the stories are the same.

Is there no other work that is available to you?

-TRANSLATION:

-Only prostitution. There's nothing.

Really? That's the only alternative?

-There's nothing?

-There's nothing.

Does it feel like you're trapped?

-TRANSLATION:

-The tea plantations are better

because, even though the work is hard, you go home tired,

but your body is safe.

Even in difficult times, it's better than going to work in the bars

and being beaten up and getting a bad name.

You end up walking the streets, getting diseases.

You can end up dead.

Don't worry about our suffering.

We know that, when you buy our tea, we get our wages.

If you stop drinking our tea, then we'll suffer.

Unilever disputed the reliability

of some of these allegations of sexual harassment,

but they've confirmed it's a deep-rooted social problem

in rural Kenya

and they told us they've investigated

the claims of sexual harassment, sacked several employees

and reorganised tea estate management.

They're adamant workers always receive Unilever's basic wage,

equivalent to less than £3 a day.

So much of the stuff we take for granted in everyday life

is produced by people who work for a fraction of what we live on.

What appears to us to be tiny variations

in the price we pay for tea or in pickers' wages,

can have a colossal impact on millions of lives.

Eight other countries around Kenya also grow our tea.

I went further west, into Uganda,

the final stage of my journey.

I'd arrived in Tooro, Uganda's main tea-growing region,

almost 1,000 miles from the start of my journey.

Uganda's even poorer than Kenya,

but, after years of instability, the economy's growing at a steady pace.

I was on my way to a factory to see tea being processed,

some of it destined for Britain.

The general manager of the Mabale tea factory, Kenneth Kyamulesire,

showed me how it's done.

This is a process called withering.

-Withering?

-Withering.

-Oh, right.

The idea is to reduce the excess moisture that is in the leaf.

So these have been withered?

Yes, this leaf is withered.

It's being loaded onto this monorail.

It's taking it into the processing room.

Choppers, graders, shakers and driers transform lush green leaves

into the dry black stuff that goes into our teabags.

-So it gives the tea a hammering?

-Yes.

After it's crushed, it's chopped ever finer in a series of mills

until it's the right size to go in a teabag.

Blowing hot air through the tea oxidises it

and gives it its characteristic brown colour.

Because, on this process now,

we can literally see the tea changing colour.

Here we go now.

For the first time on the tea trail,

we see, in the tea process, tea as we know it.

Look at it!

I'm sorry about the noise, but...

It's then dried and packaged, ready for export,

to be put in teabags and sold on your local high street.

This one is going to be shipped to Mombasa.

Tea's an important part of the Ugandan economy.

But this is still a desperately poor country.

More than a quarter of the population

lives on less than a pound a day.

Petrol station.

The petrol's in bottles inside this little crate.

-All right? Are we good to go on?

-Yes.

In Uganda's fields, I came across perhaps the most controversial issue

on the entire tea trail.

Child labour.

Almost two million children work in Uganda, mostly in agriculture,

and many of them are employed on tea farms.

To understand why so many young children are working here,

I met up with Moses Ntenga,

who runs Joy For Children Uganda,

a charity campaigning to improve children's lives here.

TRANSLATION: The reason is some of them are orphaned.

They don't have parents at home.

They have guardians who are old and can't work,

so they expect the children to go to work in the plantations

and get the money as a source of income to look after their families.

Some of them are living in real poverty.

Michael Steddy began working on tea farms

after the death of his parents.

Michael, how old were you, then,

when you took over running your family when your parents died?

TRANSLATION: My parents died when I was 13.

I took the decision to look after my brothers and sisters

because, if I had gone to school as well,

I thought they wouldn't survive.

If I was in school, they'd have nothing to eat,

so I stopped going to school and started to work

to pay for their education.

The money I earned in the tea fields

has helped look after my brothers and sisters.

I'm like a parent to them.

I'm the eldest.

They see me as a dad.

There are more than two million orphans in Uganda,

many as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Often they're forced to work when they could be in school.

Child labour is a huge issue.

Youngsters work to eat but don't get the education

that could get them a better job in the future.

Generations get trapped in rural poverty

in a hand-to-mouth existence.

There's no quick fix.

TRANSLATION: You can't just get rid of the problem

like turning off a light.

You need to fully understand this problem

so we can help these children.

But what you're saying is going to come as a bit of a shock

to a lot of people watching this

because they will automatically assume that child labour

is something that is bad, that is evil almost,

and it must be stopped overnight.

But you're saying you want it stopped in the long term,

but, in the short term, it's about survival for some families,

for some children,

and, in the short term, often there's no choice?

If you want to stop children working,

you need to provide food for them.

Medicine, schooling, the essentials.

If those things aren't there,

there's no way you can stop these kids from working.

Moses took me to see the tough reality

for one child labouring in the fields.

We're really out in the sticks in tea country now

and we're looking for a lad called Abel, I believe.

Since the death of his parents,

ten-year-old Abel has lived with his grandmother and two cousins.

Hello, Abel.

Shake your hand. Oh, yeah, a nice little handshake. Thank you.

Oh, it's strong. Oh, it's so strong!

They grow some crops but it's not enough to feed the family.

They survive on one meal a day.

So Abel works in the local tea fields.

When did you start picking tea?

And how much tea do you pick per day?

So you'll fill the entire basket in a morning, is that right?

Abel works for a local smallholder

who pays him 1,000 Ugandan shillings a day.

That's equivalent to just 25 pence, but it pays for a bag of rice.

Are you the one who earns money for the family?

What is your favourite lesson at school when you go?

-Mathematics.

-You like mathematics.

Do you ever dream about what you would like to do in life?

Low pay for tea pickers in this area

means Abel doesn't earn enough to make a decent income

and he's not getting enough schooling

to have a decent education,

so he's trapped.

The tea trade's not helping him.

Growing and picking tea should be

improving the lives of the people here, it should be helping them.

I hate to say it,

I think tea is keeping them poor.

It's upsetting to see how ingrained poverty is here.

But things are changing slowly.

Thanks to public pressure,

most of the tea that's now sold and drunk,

in the UK at least, is certified by organisations like Fairtrade.

As I'd realised, they can't guarantee that children

haven't been involved in the production at some point,

but they take a long-term view

and Fairtrade tea funds projects that combat

and will hopefully, one day, eliminate child labour.

The more we pay for our tea, the more that can be done.

Kenneth, the manager of the Mabale tea factory,

has pioneered one of these projects on a very personal level.

I remember, when I came here,

I found some children being employed in the factory.

They are children I took on myself as an individual.

I said, "Why are you not in school?" "I don't have school fees."

"Can I pay your school fees or part of the school fees?

"Can I help your parent by paying a part of the fees

"so that you go back to school?"

I took on about six kids.

You said, "You can't work in the factory any more,

"but I will pay for you to go to school"?

At first it was resisted, even by my fellow workers, who said,

"Why are you stopping them?" I told them,

"As long as I'm employed here,

"I'm not going to allow children to work in this factory."

-So you took a stand?

-Yes, I took a stand.

I did what I did not for recognition, not for that,

but I thought it was morally right.

I mean, any work, whether working in tea or in banana plantations,

it's morally wrong because you curtail this child's development.

The country stands to benefit a lot

if all its citizenry are educated.

Being saddled with a sea

of impoverished, not-educated individuals

does not make any sense

and it just compounds the problems and the development of the country.

Things have now changed in this tea factory.

In the past, many jobs here were done by children.

Now, employing children is banned,

both inside the factory and on farms that supply it with tea.

But Kenneth has gone one step further to help local children.

I travelled up the road from his factory to see how.

Hello, everybody.

Hello!

Oh! What a beautiful group of children you have.

THEY SING

Many of the children here used to work on local tea farms.

Little angels!

The school has been partly funded by the Mabale tea factory,

which sells some of its tea as Fairtrade to the UK.

That means they get a premium price

and the extra money you've paid for teabags

can be reinvested in schools like this and the local community.

THEY SING

The journey of tea from the fields of Africa

is extraordinary and complicated.

The colonial history, the Aids epidemic,

the poverty, the child labour.

What had really surprised me was just how much our simple cuppa

is linked to some of the key issues facing this part of the world.

I've loved making this journey.

It's taught me so much

about something I previously took for granted.

There's certainly a dark side to tea,

but it's also a livelihood for millions of people.

And I for one will never have a cup of tea again

without thinking of them.

Next time, I'll be following the coffee trail.

I'm in Vietnam.

We've arrived. We're in coffee country.

Oh, look at the scale here, all this coffee.

I meet a coffee billionaire.

Chairman Vu. You've got a Bentley!