Today we decided to gather all of our information from our week’s visits and decide on how to further take advantage of our time in Sri Lanka.  This was partly due to our inability to book a visit with another plantation owner in the area, and also because after our visit with Rathna cinnamon, we became better aware of the direction our research was taking us.  After assessing Rathna’s different distribution, collection, and peeling centers, we realized that it would be better to use our resources to talk to a different cinnamon expert in the area in order to better analyze our findings.
We decided to meet together after breakfast and compare our notes and our findings from the previous day’s trips.  From this we were better able to outline the structure and research arguments of our paper, to analyze what information was missing in order to create a more comprehensive report.

Firstly, we discovered that Rathna’s worker’s conditions and pay were above average of what we had expected from our research.  Given the implications of Fair Trade standards, we were initially expecting that there would be a possible discrepancy between Rathna’s workers’ conditions and those outlined in the Fair Trade audit.  Therefore, we decided that it would be best to not meet with a government official working with cinnamon in Sri Lanka, who would probably not be able to give us a thorough explanation of worker’s conditions in the cinnamon industry, and instead to meet with another cinnamon producer named Dennis Fox.  Mr. Fox is a tea and cinnamon plantation owner from England who we felt would be able to provide a different perspective on the working conditions and wage trends in this industry.

From this we decided that it would be best to also look into the feasibility of having Rathna be “ethically certified” in addition to the Fair Trade audit.  At this stage we believe this would be beneficial to both the workers of Rathna, as well as be in line with our initial intentions for the project.  Having a more clear direction of how we could approach our report helped us to better assess the structure of the report, and after comparing notes and some initial writing, we met in the afternoon to assign different parts of the paper to the different members of the group.

Essentially the day was spent reflecting on the work done to date and the considerable amount of information amassed in order to ensure that our report was focused and coherent, and we decided on an overall direction for what areas we needed to investigate in order to make our report the best it could be.  We felt that the work accomplished on the previous days, combined with our assessment for areas of further research, would create useful information for future groups studying cinnamon in Sri Lanka.