I won’t beat around the (tea) bush. CIAT’s work on what will happen to the suitability for tea of the areas where the crop is currently grown in Kenya was kinda worrying. Tea is the mother-in-law’s main source of income. No need to fret, however. I gave the lat/longs of the MIL’s spread to our friends at CIAT (it’s the little blue dot at the bottom of the map) and when they ran it through their Maxent models it turns out that the “good” tea suitability of today (yellow on the map) will increase to “very good” by 2020 (green) and even beyond that by 2050. Phew! Many thanks to Anton and Andy at CIAT for saving me some sleepless nights. Perhaps you can do China next?
When I worked at CIAT (long ago) we worked on rice, beans, cassava and tropical pastures – and very certainly not on plantation crops such as tea. What’s going on in the CGIAR: who is paying for this work? Coffee in Kenya would make more sense (or pyrethrum), as it is more of a smallholder/locally processed crop – but not tea, processed in those big tin factories run by multinationals.