Tea began its journey towards becoming the most widely consumed beverage in the world, after water, some 5 000 years ago. According to folklore, a few tea leaves accidentally wafted into a pot of water that a Chinese emperor was boiling, giving off a rich aroma and enticing the emperor to drink it. Thus was born the tea culture that began in Asia and spread to Europe in the 1600s, with European countries then setting up enormous tea plantations in their tropical colonies. Today, it takes more than four million tonnes of tea to satisfy annual consumer demand, a number that increases every year. Most of the large tea estates have been replaced by smallholder producers, who often have difficulty complying with a host of safety standards on use of pesticides. In 2012, after a decade of concerted work, the FAO Intergovernmental Group (IGG) on Tea, a subsidiary body of the Committee on Commodity Problems (CCP), spearheaded an agreement that harmonized pesticide standards, making tea production safer for consumers and protecting the livelihoods of millions of smallholder producers worldwide.