Tea as Hero Crop? Embodied Algorithms and Industrial Reform in India

In India, an industrial reform movement called ‘Tea 2030’ is underway. Tea 2030 is driven by concern about two numbers: tea prices, determined by expert tasters in auction houses, and labor costs, calculated on tea plantations. According to reformers, prices are too low and labor costs are too high. If this problem could be corrected, reformers claim, tea could change, too, from an oppressive legacy of the British colonial era to a ‘hero crop.’ A hero crop would deliver development benefits in addition to income, improving the lives of farmers and undoing the injustices of a colonial past. The hero crop narrative, however, elides a longstanding, embodied set of relationships between tea and numbers in India. Ethnographic and archival material from tea plantations and tea auctions in Northeast India shows how prices and labor costs emerge as part of colonially rooted evaluative practices. Prices are the outcome of a sensory and linguistic process in which bodies value, while labor costs are the outcome of legal and technical processes that value bodies. These evaluative processes are embodied algorithms. Tea 2030’s proposed restructuring of embodied algorithms for prices and labor costs may, however, do more harm than good.