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Development of the Certified Elephant Friendly™ Tea standards and certification program

  • Published on January 1, 2020
The Certified Elephant Friendly™ Tea program incentivizes tea plantations to meet high standards for protection of elephant habitat and water resources.
Certified Elephant Friendly™ Tea, a collaboration with the Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network and the University of Montana, is protecting Asian elephants on tea plantations in India. The Certified Elephant Friendly™ standards, drafted and piloted in 2017-2018 and formalized in 2019, are reducing human-elephant conflict, reducing barriers to elephant movement between elephant habitat areas, eliminating electrocution risks to elephants from fencing and power lines, eliminating drainage ditches and other hazards that may injure elephants, and eliminating risk of poisoning from agrochemicals. The Certified Elephant Friendly™ Tea program has received significant media attention including from the BBC, NPR, Times of India, and many more magazines and newspapers. One challenge is that while this certification has many benefits for businesses, consumers, and wildlife alike, and while WFEN provides some assistance in helping certified products to reach new markets, unfortunately certification does not ameliorate any problems in market access caused by product quality issues.

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