Is the tea industry really taking steps to be more ethical and sustainable?

Next month the Tea Board of India will launch a new sustainability code that it hopes will redefine the way the industry works. Quality compliance, ethical sourcing – including welfare and health and safety standards – and efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change are all expected to be important factors in the new code, which was developed in partnership with the Rainforest Alliance, Hindustan Unilever and two other sustainability organisations.

Part of the board's aim is to keep the country – one of the world's largest producers of tea, alongside China, Sri Lanka, Kenya and Indonesia – competitive in a large and growing market. World tea consumption increased by 5.6% in 2010 and is expected to reach 3.36m tonnes by 2021, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

It is not alone in its efforts to improve fairness and sustainability in the world tea industry: certification bodies, NGOs and businesses all have an interest in the conversation. Erinch Sahan, a private sector policy adviser at Oxfam, argues that there is still some way to go and that the food sector broadly is not as engaged with supply chain issues as their peers in the clothing industry.

"When you compare apparel with agriculture supply chains [including tea], there's a lot less engagement with supply chains in agricultural sourcing. There are fewer boots on the ground trying to understand issues; it is more fragmented and there is less traceability."

Certification bodies have played an important part in getting ethical issues on to the agenda but they have a "blind spot" when it comes to wages in plantations, Sahan said: they need to do more to ensure that workers are paid a living wage rather than simply a minimum wage. Oxfam recently produced a joint report on this with the Ethical Tea Partnership, which represents 29 tea companies.

Sarah Roberts, executive director of the ETP, would not say whether or not the partnership's members, which represent a "high proportion" of the western market, would be willing to pay more to increase wages.

"The project has taken us several steps forward in understanding the realities and complexities of wages in the tea sector," she said.

"It is a challenging issue that everyone is looking at at the moment. There are gaps between minimum wage and living wage everywhere, including the UK."

The ETP was set up in 1997 by tea companies that wanted to work together pre-competitively to improve the lives of tea workers and the environment. "We do a lot of work on ensuring that all the producers that members buy from meet good standards," she said.

Roberts, who worked in sustainability in trade policy, forestry, garments and cocoa before joining ETP, does not recognise the picture presented by Sahan of a great distance between producers and tea companies; even where ETP members buy from a smallholder collective or at auction, for example, they know which estate or smallholders it is coming from, she said.

"What is interesting in this industry is that there are quite a lot of close relationships between buyers and suppliers. You get people who visit suppliers quite regularly and who have been buying from them for a long time… There's a real sense of wanting to make sure that they are buying from companies that look after their workers."

Keith Writer, the commodities director at Taylors of Harrogate, agreed. "We have a strong relationship with [producers and local communities] that's at the heart of our business model so we understand who we are dealing with and they understand us," he said.

"Over the years we have built a good understanding of one another's needs. At the moment we are looking at how we can change our business model to help face some of the challenges we will see in the tea industry."

To Writer, it makes straightforward business sense to work together with growers to ensure a quality supply and security for the growers. High ethical standards are also important to consumers, he added.

He is particularly proud of Taylors' achievements in Rwanda, where it has used money from DFID's Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund to work with producers to improve the quality of their tea.

"It means we can buy more and we can pay more," Writer said. "We also work with them towards Rainforest Alliance certification, which has brought improvements around environmental and social conditions as well. The other part of it is how we can face in to climate change at local levels."

Roberts's goal for ETP is to take initiatives that have worked on a small scale and make them big enough to get the industry to a tipping point.

"There is lots of good practice; the challenge now is how do we get it so that it becomes the norm?" she said.

"We have very good experience of raising standards. We have really strong partnerships coming together with some of the more difficult issues, such as wages and benefits and supporting better options for women. We could really take some of these approaches to scale."

For example, the farmer field school project – working now in Kenya – could have huge benefits for communities and for quality production if it was rolled out globally, she said.

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