Pick up a packet of tea from any major brand at the supermarket and you'll likely see labels promising consumers the tea inside is ethically sourced.
Certification schemes like Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade are meant to ensure tea workers are paid a minimum wage, have safe working and living conditions and can access basic necessities like clean drinking water on tea estates.
But do they?
A Foreign Correspondent investigation in Sri Lanka has found several certified estates on the supplier lists of the world's biggest brands were failing to live up to these ethical promises.
Many brands use third-party auditors to certify that standards are being met to assure consumers, but the ABC found serious flaws in this system.
At estates certified by Rainforest Alliance, the largest ethical certification scheme in Sri Lanka's tea industry, we found workers without access to drinking water and toilets in the tea fields, dilapidated housing and children working in vegetable gardens instead of attending school — all breaches of the scheme's standards.
"Ethical standards are really a marketing tool," said Michael Joachim, who runs an NGO advocating for Sri Lankan tea workers. "The workers themselves don't know the tea is being sold on the basis of the certification standards."
In dozens of interviews with tea workers and industry experts, many of whom were unwilling to speak on the record for fear of Sri Lanka's powerful tea interests, these problems were confirmed to be widespread.
Harsh reality on 'ethical' estates
In the remote hills behind the city of Kandy, in Sri Lanka's central highlands, the tea plantations stretch out over rolling hills like a vast emerald carpet.
In estates all over the region, women move among manicured rows of tea bushes plucking glossy leaves and stuffing them in sacks slung from their foreheads.
It's an idyllic scene, but life for workers on the plantations is anything but.
Many work barefooted, scaling the steep slopes through brittle undergrowth where leeches and snakes often lurk.
Foreign Correspondent visited eight tea estates listed as suppliers to popular brands including Lipton, Tetley, Twinings, Yorkshire Tea and Dilmah.
On one estate, listed as a supplier for Lipton and Twinings, we met estate worker Darshini.
The estate had Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certification. While Lipton only sources tea from Rainforest Alliance-certified estates, Twinings has its own set of ethical standards.
Darshini has been a tea plucker for nearly three decades, since she was a teenager, and knows the meaning of a hard day's work.
She was one of dozens of women plucking tea in a remote field on the day the ABC visited.
The work is arduous. To receive the minimum wage she needs to pluck 18kg of tea before the daily weigh-in to meet her quota.
"I have only plucked 6kg so far. I have to pick another 12 kilos," she said. "If it's 15 kilos or less I'll get half pay."
When the workers finish plucking for the day they must march several kilometres to the weigh-in, with heavy sacks of tea leaves on their backs.
Tea workers face difficult working conditions on the estates.
Foreign Correspondent: Tom Joyner
Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certification is intended to ease some of the harsh conditions inherent in this kind of work.
For workers on this estate, it should guarantee they "always have access to safe and sufficient drinking water" and "sufficient, clean and functioning toilets" either in the fields or close by.
But the workers here told the ABC the plantation had provided neither.
"We do not have these facilities while we are in the field," said tea plucker Maheswarie. "There is no toilet in the field."
They also said that they regularly lost access to drinking water in their houses on the estate.
Breaches of Rainforest Alliance standards should be uncovered through routine audits, but according to Maheswarie, the auditors come but managers "don't allow us to talk to them".
“Maybe the auditors don’t get to talk to us because we might tell them the truth," she said.
'There is no real checking'
Many of the tea pluckers on Sri Lanka's vast estates also live on site in supplied homes known as line houses.
Nestled at the edge of the tea fields, the line houses stand in rows, long single-storey buildings of weathered stone topped with scraps of corrugated iron.
Many date back to the colonial days of British Ceylon and appear to have changed little since then.
On one estate visited by the ABC, we met tea plucker Vimaladevi, who showed us inside the one-bedroom home where she lives with seven family members.
"I was born in this house and all my children were born here," she said.
This plantation has Rainforest Alliance certification and is on the supplier list of Tetley, Dilmah, Lipton, Twinings and Yorkshire Tea.
Under Rainforest Alliance certification, these houses need to be "safe, clean and decent", but Vimaladevi's roof is damaged and her home regularly floods.
During the dry season, there's no drinking water. Early last year "for three months we didn't have water," she said.
Despite Rainforest Alliance requiring audits to ensure that standards are met, Vimaladevi said she's never met an auditor.
"Nobody's come to see our house. You're the only one to come and see."
Who's actually responsible for maintaining these houses is a complicated issue in Sri Lanka.
This plantation, like many others, operates on government-owned land which is leased to the estate and this shared responsibility can mean issues fall through the cracks.
While the Sri Lankan government has announced programs to either construct new homes or repair houses on estates, many workers are still living in dilapidated conditions.
The auditing system that's supposed to highlight these lapses is also broken, according to Michael Joachim, who runs a local NGO that's been working with tea pluckers for nearly four decades.
He said audits conducted by certifiers are often pre-arranged.
"There is no real checking from the workers to see whether ethical standards are being followed," Mr Joachim said.
"And the workers don't know that the teas are being sold on the basis that the certification standards are prevailing here."
He dismissed certification schemes as little more than "a marketing strategy where you convince the buyer that ethical standards are being followed, but in truth the ethical standards are not being followed here."
The tea brands defended their use of certification.
Lipton confirmed that it undertakes independent checks on its suppliers and "[estates] are routinely checked to ensure they meet certain and environmental and social standards."
Tetley also said that it maintains direct contact with suppliers.
"In addition to the independent audits conducted as part of RA Certification, our own team of tea buyers regularly visits estates and conducts informal audits which include talking to workers," said a Tetley spokesperson.
Dilmah confirmed while it holds Rainforest Alliance certification, the brand does its own checks and "conducts random audits of other tea estates to ensure compliance."
Yorkshire Tea said that it was aware that "certification only provides limited protection" and had its own monitoring system in place.
In a statement, Twinings, which has its own independent standards instead of Rainforest Alliance or Fairtrade certification, said that it took the standards in its supply chain extremely seriously and has "a team of people based in our key sourcing countries who work with our suppliers to check that these internationally recognised standards … are being met."
Sri Lankan tea is exported to over 140 countries and remains a vital part of the national economy, directly employing around 10 per cent of the population.
The country produces more than 250 million kilograms of tea each year and is the second largest supplier of tea to Australia.
"There is no real checking from the workers to see whether ethical standards are being followed." — Michael Joachim
Once the world's biggest tea producer, today Sri Lanka is struggling to compete with countries like China, India and Kenya.
Economic instability, rising production costs and increasing global competition have pushed prices down, making it harder for Sri Lankan producers to stay afloat.
"We are a high-cost, high-value producer, but the margin is wafer-thin," said Sri Lankan tea broker Anil Cooke.
"So even a small shift in price can mean producers are selling tea for less than it costs to make. And this is the 'dance with the devil' we face every week. A hundred bags of tea on a shelf are being sold for about the same price as a single cup of coffee."
In a statement, Dilmah said that the tea industry is being undervalued, further exacerbating the problems.
"The Sri Lankan tea industry suffers the paradox of a colonial structure struggling for survival in a 21st century context with the added hostility of the discount culture that adds toxicity to that paradox," a spokesperson said.
It's estate workers who are bearing the brunt of this price squeeze.
Suranga Herath, a veteran tea producer, has seen the problem firsthand.
In 2010, frustrated by the poor conditions on tea estates, he decided to take a different approach with his company English Tea Shop.
He shifted towards selling higher-value botanical teas and sourcing directly from small farms, as well as becoming entirely organic to avoid having to sell through the auction system.
He found he could charge more for the product while ensuring fairer wages for workers.
"We saw, even way back, how tea was being traded down, commoditised and squeezed by price pressure," he said.
"But the [money] wasn't filtering down properly to the workers. At times, we felt helpless. We didn't know how to address their living conditions, their housing. The issue of a living wage was massive."
He said "the elephant in the room" remains price.
"Consumers are not demanding cheap teas. It's traded down by the brands," he said. "So how do you move out of the vicious cycle? It's up to the brands to make that first move."
Some of the tea brands told Foreign Correspondent they're aware of the toll low prices at the supermarket check-out are exacting on tea producers around the world.
"Price is at the centre of this whole issue," a spokesperson from Dilmah said, noting that "36 per cent of all tea sold in Australia was discounted" in 2024.
A spokesperson for Lipton agreed, saying when "the typical price of a tea bag is just 6 cents, it is not sustainable".
The squeeze on tea workers
Poverty is a major issue here. Legally, estates are required to pay their employees a minimum wage, which is also a requirement of both Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certification.
But Darshini said she struggles to support her family on the minimum wage and sometimes has to send her three children to school without food.
Many workers get caught in a cycle of pay advances and end up in debt.
"We do not have enough money to pay our loans. It's not enough to feed the children either," she said. "We eat one meal a day but the rest of the time we starve."
In some cases, poverty on the estates means children are left with no other choice but to seek work instead of attending school.
Under Sri Lankan law, and Rainforest Alliance certification standards, all school-age children living on tea estates are required to go to school until they're 16.
But on one estate holding Rainforest Alliance certification, the ABC found two children working as labourers in privately-owned vegetable gardens on the estate.
One 12-year-old girl working in the gardens said she dropped out of school a year ago and no one had noticed.
"I went to work because my family was suffering," she said, adding that the 500 rupees ($2.65) she makes working puts food on the table for her family.
"Sometimes we cry because there is no food and we're starving."
She desperately wants to go to school and to be able to play with the other kids in the afternoons, but her family's poverty leaves her little choice.
Flaws in the system
Rainforest Alliance's country representative in Sri Lanka, Jehan CanagaRetna, said that children "definitely shouldn't" be dropping out of school to work.
"It would be a failure of the fact that [the estate is] not following the standards and that needs to be corrected immediately," he said.
He said it's challenging to ensure standards are maintained at all of the estates certified by his organisation due to the fact they operate on land that belongs to the government.
This means improving things like access to water and toilets in both the fields and in houses is difficult.
"But the problem is the regional plantation companies also struggle to get to that level of income to be able to do all this," he said.
"And if the shared responsibility [between the government and the estates] doesn't come into play, it's going to be very hard."
When asked about the lapses on Rainforest Alliance certified estates, he said supermarkets and brands need to help solve the problem by raising prices.
"So at one stage you have people demanding that you have these things, but they also won't partake in trying to solve that very problem that they demand that should be solved," he said.
But he said it's also the responsibility of "every person drinking a cup of tea" to know where it comes from and how the people producing it are living.
Mr CanagaRetna said that if audits are missing breaches then "there's something wrong with that system", but certifiers can't improve standards on estates by just suspending those that don't comply.
"It's not just easy to just go and suspend them, that doesn't work either because that'll just spiral into a different issue after that," he said.
The better approach is to work with estates to keep improving conditions, he said.
"So my role in here would be to have discussions with them and see where they stand and what are the issues that they're having."
Roshan Rajadurai, the spokesperson for the Planter's Association of Ceylon, the body representing the major tea estates, said it's nearly impossible for estates to ensure all workers have access to proper working and living conditions.
"You have to understand that we care for 1 million people in a vast, almost-70,000-hectare span," he said. "There may be cases. I'm not saying that a hundred per cent, we don't know."
Mr Rajadurai said that estate companies like his own have worked to improve conditions on the estates, including building more than 100,000 toilets, improved access to drinking water and nearly 65,000 new houses for workers.
But the estates are unable to keep up with costly certification schemes while the sale price of tea struggles to match the cost of production.
"The brands are only demanding an arm and a leg and paying us $4 at auctions," he said.
"[They] can insist that their local agents pay us more. They want everything and we have to sort it from the meagre earnings, which now currently the earnings are equal to the cost. Even if you want to do very altruistic and do something for the workers, where is this money coming from?"
Sri Lankan tea at a crossroads
The ABC alerted the brands to the issues identified on the estates but did not name specific locations, in case the workers faced repercussions for speaking out.
In statements, Twinings, Lipton, Yorkshire Tea, Dilmah and Tetley said that conditions at the estates on their supplier lists are routinely monitored, and some of the brands said they will be investigating the issues raised.
Sri Lanka's tea industry faces a fundamental challenge: how to ensure that tea is produced at a price that allows workers to earn a living wage.
Some, like Suranga Herath, argue certification schemes don't go far enough in guaranteeing fair conditions for workers and shouldn't be used as a shield by brands to avoid taking responsibility.
"Brands have to step up — build direct relationships with producers and farms, ensure wages are fair, and improve living conditions," said Suranga. "You can't just slap on a Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance logo and call it ethical. That's not enough."
?Watch Foreign Correspondent's full investigation tonight at 8pm on ABC TV and streaming on ABC iview and YouTube.
Full statements from the tea brands are available here on our website.
