After a Drought Halved the Harvest, Fair-Trade Rooibos Just Paid Its Cederberg Growers More

If you drink fair-trade rooibos, this is the year that pricing earned its keep. A drought and a flood-battered winter roughly halved the 2026 harvest of two Cederberg co-operatives run by small family farmers, and on June 4 their French buyer, Ethiquable, said it had raised the prices it pays them so the growers can afford to replant the bushes that died.

The two co-operatives, the Heiveld Co-operative in the Suid Bokkeveld and the Wupperthal Original Rooibos Tea Co-operative in the Cederberg, are run by small-scale family farmers rather than commercial estates. Ethiquable has bought from Wupperthal since 2007 and strengthened its partnership with Heiveld in 2023.

South Africa's 2025 season brought seven months of almost no rain, followed by an unusually wet and cold winter that caused flooding and frost at higher altitudes, Ethiquable said. The combination, the buyer said, cut the co-operatives' 2026 harvests roughly in half and killed about 95 percent of the rooibos seedlings planted that year, losses concentrated in the fragile fynbos terrain both communities farm. Those figures are Ethiquable's own account of conditions at its two partner co-operatives, not an industry-wide audit.

The South African Rooibos Council, the industry body, said in February that "drought and heat stress" were affecting growing regions broadly and that "the current season's harvest cannot yet be reliably estimated." The council also reported total rooibos production falling from about 17,000 tons in 2023 to roughly 15,000 tons the following year, even as exports climbed to a record. The two figures, rising exports and falling production, describe the same squeeze from different ends: more of a smaller crop is leaving the country.

In response to the losses at its two partner co-operatives, Ethiquable said it raised its purchase prices, which it pays at roughly double prevailing market rates under fair-trade terms, so the growers can afford to replant the bushes that died and secure future harvests. The buyer said fair-trade pricing is built to support family farming methods rather than the irrigated, hired-labor model of larger commercial plantations. For a drinker, that is the concrete thing a fair-trade label on the packet is meant to buy: in a year the crop failed, the people who grew it were paid enough to plant it again.

Sources: Ethiquable, "Soutenir la production familiale de rooibos" (June 4, 2026); South African Rooibos Council, "As Exports Grow, Rooibos Maintains Course Amid Climate and Trade Pressures"; Daily Maverick, "Rooibos exports soar even as climate stress squeezes Cederberg supply" (Feb. 26, 2026).