International Tea Day - Statement from Ethical Partnership - 15|12|2005

Executive director of the Ethical Tea Partnership, Dr Gavin Bailey, comments:
"The International Tea Day highlights some of the challenges being faced by the global tea industry.  Whilst other initiatives seek to address the issue of supply and demand, the global monitoring programme run by the Ethical Tea Partnership seeks to monitor conditions on estates against local law, trade union agreements and relevant ILO conventions.

"Since we started our monitoring in 1997, we have witnessed significant improvements in conditions on estates in the seven countries where we are currently active.  We expect this trend to continue as we expand the geographical spread of our operations and build on the 600-plus estates we have monitored to date.

"During 2006 the Ethical Tea Partnership plans to engage the smallholder community, using the recently launched ETI Smallholders Guidelines as a basis for our work.  We look forward to working with other key stakeholders to tackle the challenges facing the industry and will play our part in ensuring that consumers can drink their tea in the knowledge that it has been produced in a socially responsible way."

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