Monthly Archive for July, 2010

In January of this year, The New York Times ranked Sri Lanka as its #1 “Place to Go in 2010”, and rightfully so, as Sri Lanka is arguably one of the most naturally beautiful corners of our planet. The tear-dropped shaped island has recently been portrayed as a “corner”, having been marred by years of internal conflict between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The past year has witnessed domestic peace, which hopefully will continue for ages to come.

But peace in a third-world country is tenuous, as most of the citizens live on means that most Westerners will never be fully capable of understanding. However, as Amartya Sen famously penned in the first sentence of his Nobel Prize winning work “Development As Freedom”, “development can be seen as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy.” And freedom and peace go hand in hand.

For most countries, the starting point for economic development is by and through its earth-given natural resources. In many African countries, like Ghana, these are fossil fuels. In many South American countries, like Brazil, these are soils where tropical crops like sugar cane are grown. In Sri Lanka, due to its unique combination of location-altitude-temperature-rainfall, it is tea production. Tea here is known as Ceylon tea, taking the former name of the country.

For the past century, Ceylon tea has been regarded around the world as the global standard for quality. I can attest. In 2004, I made my first of many visits to the island and to the world’s first organic tea estate–Indulgashinna,. I have been working with the tea growers at Idulgashinna ever since to help promote peace and sustainable economic development by promoting the ethical trade of the country’s high quality tea globally.

My company, Partner’s Tea Company, sources our Fair Trade and Organic Pure Ceylon Green Tea from this estate. We give one percent of our total annual revenue back to the community of tea growers at Idulgashinna through their non profit association– Idulgashinna Bio Tea Association for Development (IBITAD), as our mission is to “empower women through education and opportunity with 1% of every purchase”.