Dilmah Message

Ethical Tea - Fairest of All.

To be ‘fair’ is to be free of self interest, bias or deception. In the context of trade then you would think fair trade would be free of these evils. Unfortunately it is not so and, as Fairtrade - the organisation - has amply demonstrated, elements of the world’s trading systems are fundamentally unfair. It was not always so and I believe the solutions to the problem of unfair trade lie in history and ethical behavior.

By
Merrill J Fernando
Founder Dilmah TEA

I have devoted my life to tea; a passion that is now shared by my sons. As a family engaged in the business of growing, packing and marketing our own brand of tea, we always understood that it is incumbent upon those that are blessed with success to share the benefits of their success with others who may not be so fortunate.

We never sought help in comprehending the basic concept that ‘business is a matter of human service’. At the beginning I did what I could and within the modest scale of my fledgling business, helped my staff and their families. Today by the grace and favour of God and the efforts of my staff and my family, our business has grown. It follows that my ethical obligation to share should grow in the same way.

A sea of acronyms, declarations and apparently well meaning organizations has arisen around the meaning of fair trade. Yet really there is nothing complex about the concept of being fair that requires such extraordinary effort and complex analysis. Dilmah Founder

Organizations apparently committed to the cause of fairness in trade seem to be missing a fundamental point. In any context human rights, worker welfare or social justice – whatever you wish to call it – cannot be assured solely by certification and the mountain of compliance documents that buyers heap on producers today. It is ultimately about the price that is paid to the producer for the goods or services.

In the main, producers know their ethical obligations to workers and, because they live among those workers and witness their socio-economic circumstances, they are more aware of that commitment than their Western customers. The reason they often default on their commitments is that they lack the means to do so. It is not that their product does not ultimately generate enough money to fulfill this commitment, but that the money ends up in the wrong pockets. Certification and documentation cannot address that.

London was established as the tea centre of the world during the British Colonial time. Tea produced in Ceylon , India and Africa, the major producers, was consigned to London for sale by auction. At that time there were several small and medium family companies engaged in blending, packaging, branding and marketing tea in almost every country. Families, who took pride in the quality of their tea and provided consumers a choice of good quality tea, never competed on price but on quality. They were able to maintain the high quality of their blends. This was still not a fair structure for the tea industry due to the control of value addition offshore, but producers received a fair price for their crop and, as a result, their workers were well looked after. Everybody in the supply chain was content.