The Plantation sector is one of the most challenging industries. Can you give us a sense of those challenges and explain why the sustainability approach to business is crucial to Talawakelle Tea Estates?
As plantation managers, we deal with challenges that no other industry can match in complexity and scale. We have to run sustainable businesses and are accountable for our workers and their dependents who live in plantation communities. Increasingly, consumers also care about the environment and social impact, so investing in broad sustainability initiatives is critical to sustaining the business, driving growth and securing the future.
One of the burning challenges affecting the industry’s future revolves around labour. The industry has inherited a legacy challenge around uplifting the dignity of its workers. We are experiencing a mass migration of young workers because they do not want to be associated with estate labour. Unlike other tea growing nations, our proximity to the equator requires constant upkeep of the tea crops while harvesting and manufacturing happen around the clock. Therefore, a shortage of workers is a death sentence for an industry that is 70% labour intensive. We found a solution by framing this challenge from a sustainability perspective.
To provide a pull factor to the workers and the community, we at Talawakelle Tea Estates introduced a revenue-share model where workers get a block of tea plantation land and shoulder the responsibility for productivity. They feel empowered and relish the opportunity to be enterprising, and the results have been encouraging. We have seen productivity and output doubling while the workers are content and dignified by the responsibility. About 40% of our boughtleaf comes from these worker-managed blocks.
Our approach to sustainability is threepronged: economic, environmental and social. While the environment is a huge area of focus with our environment-friendly best agriculture practices in water conservation, energy conservation, fauna and flora protection, we also have identified that economic sustainability translates directly to our employees. Our revenue-share model is one such initiative under the economic pillar. We aim to create more opportunities for over 42,000 resident communities, including workers and their families. As responsible plantation managers, we must provide the conditions and opportunities to elevate their quality of life.
Can you break down Talawakelle Tea Estates’ sustainability drive and explain its environment and social aspects?
Under the social pillar, our focus is to unlock new value by linking social and business results, thereby improving the quality of life, decent work, competency levels and earning capacity of the workforce. Through our ongoing dedicated social responsibility initiative to support and uplift resident communities with better living conditions and higher quality of life called A Home for Every Plantation Worker, we invested Rs. 97 million in 2020/21.
We have embedded the environmental aspect of sustainability into everything we do. We are responsible for everything in our custody, from the fauna and flora to the water, soil and people. We have three mini-hydro plants and solar rooftop panels within our tea factories to generate renewable energy. Renewable energy generation accounts for 148% of the total energy consumption. Our reforestation project has pledged to plant a million trees, and we have replanted eight hectares with native plant species. We also have an ecosystem restoration project at St. Clair Falls, and we continued our efforts despite the many challenges post-pandemic.
Talawakelle Tea Estates is also the world’s first plantation company to commit to the UN Climate Neutral Now pledge and set GHG emission reduction targets from the Science-Based Target initiative (SBTi) towards transitioning to NetZero emissions by 2050. We have deployed climate-smart agricultural practices and have resorted to regenerative agriculture to improve the soil and ecosystems. These measures require investments, processes and constant monitoring.
Talawakelle Tea Estates recently won the ACCA Sustainability Reporting Award in the Retail and Trading category. What does that mean to you?
The ACCA Sustainability Reporting Award demonstrates our steadfast commitment to the people, society and environment. It validates all our efforts to build sustainability into the very core of the business. It allows us to measure our performance and provide a framework for sustainability reporting such as GRI reporting and other climate-related accounting standards. While we have won several global awards for our sustainability reporting and projects, the most profound rewards are the outcomes and successes of our sustainability efforts to secure the futures of our industry, company and people.