From Good to Great

Moving away from the recent cluster of editorials which focused on the crisis facing the country, we shift gear today to a more positive development taking root in the country’s industrial sector.

That’s not saying we are unconcerned about the state of play in the country which is suitably illustrated by the article below from JBIZ, the once-powerful group of chamber organizations that speaks for the entire chamber movement AND HAS SUDDENLY WOKEN UP FROM A DEEP SLUMBER, and the meeting this week in Colombo by Sri Lanka First, the business-peace grouping, to evaluate the APRC (All Party Representatives Committee) peace proposals.

Nevertheless there is always a silver lining – many may dispute us on this issue – in a depressing situation and that’s what we like to comment on this week. Our lead story on the previous page about the Hirdaramani group going “green’ is a positive development in a negative environment and that’s not all.

Its first-even ‘green’ factory joins MAS Holdings which also announced a “green” factory project last month and comes at a time when the global warming issue is gaining ground in Sri Lanka after The Sunday Times, several weeks back, alerted our readers to this serious crisis with an interview with Prof. Mohan Munasinghe showing the dangers of global warming to Sri Lanka and the ignorance factor. Since then there are a few seminars being organized on this topic and a leading television channel has a daily segment on its news bulletin on global warming.

Hirdaramani says it hopes to make all its factories environmentally friendly, a step that most garment factories in Sri Lanka would eventually do otherwise you go out of business due to strict quality regimes in buying countries.

There is a growing consumer movement in the west that is concerned about good governance, damage to the environment, good labour standards, ethical production, worker-friendly factories and working conditions worker-family welfare, and so on. The article below on renewable energy also reinforces this.

In fact such is the power of the consumer movement that very soon on the cards of buyers would be the strict enforcement of human rights in producer countries! “We are not very far from a situation when consumers would place enforcement of human rights as a condition for the purchase of products from developing countries,” one trade unionist, who has championed labour rights issues vis-à-vis the garments trade, noted.

Sri Lanka’s human rights record may be abysmal, according to local and international rights groups, but the standards of safety, quality and integrity in the local garments trade are the best in the world. Conglomerates like MAS Holdings and Brandix and a host of garment producers here have established standards that pass through stringent quality checks from global buyers like GAP, Marks & Spence, etc. Upmarket consumers favour Sri Lankan garments not only for its quality, but because of the way it treats it workers.

Tea has also joined the race in Sri Lanka to be globally competitive with high quality production standards. Recently the Kelani Valley Plantations Ltd (KVPL) went one step further by launching what it called the world’s first ‘ethical’ teas – a story that will unravel in next week’s issue of The Sunday Times FT.

The company, among other welfare measures, looks after its workers through what it calls a ‘Womb to Tomb’ structure. “When they are born we are there to help; and in death with are with them,” explained a company official. KVPL, a Hayleys Group company, was recently honoured by being invited to give a press conference at the UN headquarters in New York to the UN press corps on its ethnical teas’ project.

Thus while we go down a ‘bottomless pit’ as described once by a stockbroker to illustrate the state of the economy, these are some of the laudable developments in the world of business and industry. Add to that the migrant worker – these are the three sectors, all driven by the private sector, that keeps the economy chugging along while politicians and their henchmen talk ‘poppycock.’ This newspaper would like to borrow the CIMA theme at its recent business summit “Good to Great’ and clasp our hands in a mark of respect to the workers in these industries without which the nation, particularly its bloated cabinet and ‘privileged’ occupants won’t survive.