Tea Day

About the day

Every tea on Earth — Darjeeling first flush, matcha, Lapsang Souchong, builders' brew, Türk çayı, Russian Karavan blend — comes from one plant: Camellia sinensis. What changes is altitude, oxidation, and the hands that pluck and roll the leaf. Tea Day is the FAO's annual look at the part of the supply chain most consumers never see.

Where it came from

The idea began with India. Trade unions in New Delhi started a tea-workers' awareness day on 15 December 2005, and producer countries — Sri Lanka, Nepal, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tanzania — gradually joined them. In 2015 the FAO Intergovernmental Group on Tea, meeting in Milan, backed turning the observance into a UN day; the Indian government formally proposed it in 2018. On 21 December 2019, the General Assembly adopted resolution A/RES/74/241, naming 21 May as International Tea Day with the FAO leading. The first UN observance fell on 21 May 2020 — almost entirely virtual, since the pandemic had closed FAO headquarters two months earlier. This is the seventh time the day has been marked.

What's new in 2026

The FAO theme for the year is "Fostering Growth and Inclusion", focused on smallholder farmers, fair wages, and young people entering the trade. The flagship observance runs at FAO headquarters in Rome on 21 May, hosted by Director-General QU Dongyu, with the Intergovernmental Group on Tea coordinating speakers from China, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Türkiye. The agenda includes a tasting session built around teas grown on FAO-designated heritage landscapes. Coverage of the theme also acknowledges what most consumer-side conversations skip: women make up the majority of the workforce on tea plantations and earn, on average, roughly half what men do for the same work.

Five things worth knowing

1. After water, tea is the most-consumed drink on Earth. Per-capita consumption has risen about 2.1% per year over the past decade, with the strongest growth happening inside producer countries rather than in the historic importer markets.
2. Roughly 60% of the world's tea comes from smallholders — about nine million of them, concentrated in China, India, Kenya and Sri Lanka. Global tea production is worth around USD 17 billion per year at farm gate, a fraction of what the same leaves sell for once branded.
3. The single highest per-capita tea consumption in the world is in Türkiye, where the Black Sea province of Rize produces almost the entire domestic supply on terraced hillsides and the standard serving glass — the tulip-shaped ince belli — was popularised in the 1940s, designed so the rim stays hot enough to drink and the waist stays cool enough to hold.
4. The FAO has designated several tea-producing landscapes as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, among them the Pu'er traditional tea agrosystem in Yunnan, China (2012), the traditional tea-grass integrated system in Shizuoka, Japan (2013), and the Anxi Tieguanyin culture in Fujian (2022).
5. Tea reached Europe through the Dutch East India Company in 1610, more than thirty years before the first coffeehouses opened in London. The British habit came later, via Catherine of Braganza in 1662; without her Portuguese dowry, the Boston Tea Party would have been about something else.

What to gift

• A single-origin loose-leaf tea from a named garden, not a blend — Darjeeling first flush from Castleton or Margaret's Hope, Wuyi rock oolong, Kenyan purple, Shizuoka sencha, Anatolian Çaykur Filiz. The garden matters as much as the cultivar.
• A proper brewing vessel for what the person actually drinks: a porcelain gaiwan for Chinese tea, a Japanese kyusu for sencha, a Russian samovar or a Turkish çaydanlık double-stack pot, a heavy borosilicate teapot for the agnostic.
• A subscription to a monthly tea club — Postcard Teas in London, Bellocq, or a regional roaster who ships fresh leaf rather than year-old stock.
• A guided tasting at a serious tea room, or — if travel is on the cards — a single-day course at a working garden in Yunnan, Uji or Nuwara Eliya.
• A book: For All the Tea in China by Sarah Rose for the story of Robert Fortune's botanical theft from Wuyi to Darjeeling, or The True History of Tea by Mair and Hoh for the long version.
• A donation in the recipient's name to the Fairtrade Foundation, the Ethical Tea Partnership, or a tea-worker cooperative in Assam or central Kenya.