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...