CSR, Fair Trade

The main Satemwa offices are about a five mile walk through hilly tea fields. The overwhelming impression is GREEN.

As you can see, it is quite beautiful-- about 1300 hectares of coffee, tea, lumber, food crops (for the workers) and indigenous forest.

The property has belonged to the Cathcart-Kay family since the 1920s. There are many other tea estates in southern Malawi, and despite the size of the spread, Satemwa is one of the smaller ones.

We've met quite a few interesting people so far. Charles Mware is in charge of the Satemwa health clinic (left), which takes care of employees and their families. There is also a separate clinic for HIV/AIDS testing, counseling and treatment. Charles is by all accounts a very dedicated, hardworking guy. He has a mighty burden to bear: according to UNICEF, the national HIV rate in Malawi is about 12% for 15-49 year-olds (as appalling as this is, it is not high for sub-Saharan Africa-- Botswana is at 24%). This is on top of less headline-grabbing problems such as malaria and cholera. Many women have difficulty in childbirth; many die in the process.

Mike Shaw is a VSO volunteer (VSO is a British organization akin to the Peace Corps) at Satemwa. He is trying to help the workers manage the funds that they have received as a result of Satemwa's having gone Fair Trade. More on this in another post, but the workers (see the picture below of a guy picking tea) generally have no formal education beyond primary school and earn a couple bucks a day, and money management is not their forte. Mike has his work cut out for him.

I originally became interested in Satemwa through some internet research I did for the UN Global Compact on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using CSR as a framework, I focused on Satemwa's security apparatus, which not only works within the estate's boundaries but also cooperates with the surrounding villages to help them arrest, hold and transport suspected criminals to the police in Thyolo, who have limited means of transport. To the left is a picture of some community leaders holding a book containing records of the security actions taken in their area and with which Satemwa assisted.

Have learned alot in the past couple days. Satemwa provides a number of services for its employees-- health care, housing, security-- but this is nothing exceptional; most tea estates in the area do this. One of the more unique things that Satemwa has done is to conserve a significant amount of indigenous forest, which benefits workers by conserving water, reducing erosion, and encouraging rainfall. Besides benefitting the workers, this conservation is intrinsically valuable-- in additon to being beautiful and peaceful, it contains an unknown number of endemic species. A French team recently discovered a buttefly species in the Satemwa forest that occurs nowhere else. The picture to the left shows one patch of indigenous forest in the background; tea pickers are in the foreground.

What has really piqued my interest though are the issues surrounding Fair Trade. I will get into this in another post, but suffice to say, there are issues surrounding Fair Trade that don't make it onto the backs of those Starbucks sacks of coffee beans describing happy workers holding hands by clear mountain streams...

Arrival at Satemwa Tea and Coffee Estate

After a long trip, we (my girlfriend Ronit and I) arrived at Satemwa. To get here, we took a plane from NYC (JFK, a real joy) to Dubai and on to Johannesburg, South Africa. After spending the night in Joburg we caught a morning flight to Blantyre, Malawi. We spent two nights in Blantyre, at a backpacker's hostel called Doogles.

Doogles is as much a place to stay as it is a place for the locals to come eat food, drink and play pool. We did all three of those activities with some white Zimbabweans, Pete and Rogen. Their farms in Zimbabwe were seized by Robert Mugabe's government and they came to Malawi to start over. For anybody who does not follow African affairs, Mugabe, in an attempt to shore up his political base, seized almost all white-owned land and handed it to his supporters, who for the most part have failed to use these lands productively. Zimbabwe's former economy was highly dependent upon these white-owned farms (tobabcco was a huge industry) and since the land redistribution program started, Zimbabwe's economy has tanked. Inflation is so high that in neigbouring Zambia, curio stalls are selling Zimbabwean bills of 100 trillion dollars (that is not a typo-- I believe a trillion requires 12 zeroes: 100,000,000,000,000), which is worth approximately zero US dollars.

It seems that Mugabe could have found a better way to address the colonial legacy of unequal land distribution.

Anyway, after spending the night listening to Pete and Rogen wax lyrical about the old days under white rule and stories from the Zimbabwean war for independence (guess which side they were on), we went into town to buy supplies for our time at Satemwa. In town, we found huge crowds congregating around a stadium. People were blowing plastic horns and drinking local beer everywhere. Turns out that we had stumbled upon a World Cup qualifying match between Malawi and Burkina Faso. We bought a couple tickets-- 2 dollars a piece-- and entered. See the video (video camera provided by the Kogod Center for Business Communications!):

It was quite a scene, and it was a great introduction to the Malawi.

The next day we boarded a minibus for Thyolo town. The ride took us higher into Malawi's Southern Highlands. The land was very fertile and green; markets were selling all sorts of fruits and vegetables like corn, kale, collards, beets, mangos, and papayas.

Luckily, we happened to see the sign for Satemwa and we asked the minibus to pull over. Since it was getting late, we did not head to Satemwa; instead we walked to the Thyolo Sports Club, where we had arranged to camp. Here is the view from the Sports Club:

The Sports Club has a very colonial feel. Surrounded by a regular Malawian village, it has a swimming pool, tennis and squash courts, even a nine-hole golf course.

Before dinner, Ronit and I went for a walk in the surrounding village. We talked for a while with this man and his family (with alot of hand gesturing to make up for his poor English and our non-existent Chichewa). He and his family, like most families in the area, are subsistence farmers.

On our way back, we happened upon a party. They had set up a stereo-- using batteries for which they had started a collection-- and were playing Congolese music and everybody was dancing and having a good time. Ronit and I sampled the local booze. There were two kinds of alcohol. One was from maize (corn) and had the consistency of watery grits without any salt or butter, but with a bunch of unknown bits of brown stuff. Not the tastiest stuff but it's cheap and after a while it does the job. The other stuff was moonshine-- distilled liquor made from who knows what. This stuff did the trick, and after having enough of the stuff, I ended up dancing (be warned, the following video may be offensive to those of you who have rythmn):

We then returned to the Sports Club, had dinner and hit the sack after a long day.