Extract from Bent Bananas The Ecologist
Identify the social and environmental impacts of the Banana Industry, Latin America
and Cameroon (Africa)
As the Caribbean share of UK banana sales has plummeted, Latin American countries, most
notably Costa Rica, have become the biggest supplying region to the UK, producing about 60 per
cent of our bananas. But what do we know about the conditions in which Latin American bananas
are produced?
Gilberth Bermudez works for the Latin American Coordination of Banana Workers’ Unions. He gets
very angry when he talks about conditions in the banana sector of his native Costa Rica. ‘Since
the age of four,’ he says, ‘I had a machete in my hand to work with bananas. Conventional
banana production in my country is like a small bomb.’ Bermudez has slides of insecticideimpregnated blue plastic bags, waste from banana plantations, collecting in river deltas flowing
into the Caribbean Sea. ‘What are we going to show tourists in a few years when all our coasts
and beaches are polluted by intensive banana and pineapple cultivation?’ he asks. ‘Species like
the sea cow and the tortoise are facing extinction. Pesticides are killing off the algae on
which the sea cows feed, and the tortoises are asphyxiating on plastic bags from
plantations. The coral reefs are dying. When scuba divers go down now, they can’t see the
reefs for the residue from banana plantations. It’s the same story in Honduras, Belize and
Panama.’
Bermudez explains that until the 1960s, Costa Rican growers concentrated on traditional varieties
of Creole bananas that were curvy and flavoursome. Then production intensified, switching to one
variety: the Cavendish. It is straighter, tolerates refrigerated transport, and produces higher
yields and, with liberal applications of pesticides, the smooth, uniform, cosmetically perfect fruits
that supermarkets like.
The consequences of this, Bermudez says, are there for all to see: degradation of soil, and sick
people. ‘Eighty per cent of banana families live in slums with very precarious sanitary conditions
on the edge of plantations where aerial spraying of pesticides is [done] almost daily and
the planes don’t distinguish between workers’ homes and plantations. Hundreds of
children have deformed fingers and joints as a result of pesticides applied during the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Thirteen thousand male workers are sterile as a result of
working with pesticides, and still today highly toxic pesticides are being used. It is a
human tragedy, and we can’t keep silent about it.’
Bermudez’s Guatemalan colleague Selfa Sandoval tells a similar story. ‘The banana worker today
is a melancholy person with no pride in what she or he does. The gospel of free trade has made it
possible for transnational corporations to penetrate our country and violate our rights daily.’
Sandoval explains that Guatemalan banana workers typically earn less than the minimum wage
for a 12- to 14-hour day, six days a week. ‘Many female workers are illiterate and can’t afford to
send their kids to school,’ she says. ‘You have women with four or five children and dependent
parents working in semi-slave conditions in banana packing plants. Even if you have a sick child
or there’s a death in the family you can’t get leave. You are only allowed 10 to 15 days leave a
year. On the plantations pesticides are used without regard to effects on workers, so
allergies, nausea and lumbago are commonplace. Many women have varicose veins from
being on their feet for 11 to 14 hours a day. We demand our voices to be heard.’
After Latin America, the second biggest supplier of bananas to the UK is Cameroon, the West
African country that has come f
rom nowhere in the past five years to now produce 15 per cent of Britain’s bananas. In Cameroon,
vast banana plantations are being cultivated on land that used to produce palm oil. Despite
logging, 40 per cent of the country is still virgin forest, but the transnational corporations
that control banana production there are reported to be eyeing up the forest for future
expansion. Cameroon has proved highly profitable over the past five years because labour costs
are even lower than in Latin America and also because cultivation in the country qualifies for EU
development funds. But Patrick Vewessee, general-secretary of the Fako Agricultural Workers’
Union, paints an alarming picture of the cost of intensive banana production in the country. ‘You
are compelled to work 13 hours to get eight hours pay because the wages are calculated by
piecework and incentives,’ he says. ‘Many workers have to leave home at four in the morning to
get to work for a 6.30 start. They may not see their children because they leave so early and get
back so late. In Cameroon the average wage for a banana worker is £27 a month, which is not a
living wage. But even the unions do not know what bananas sell for in Europe… The banana
companies keep it a closely guarded secret.’
Approximately 30 pesticides are used in banana production in Cameroon. Some are
applied manually by workers without any protective clothing, and others are sprayed by
light planes. ‘Sometimes when the workers are in the field, the pesticides are sprayed
on them as they work,’ Vewessee says. ‘The people who have farms around the banana
plantation areas also have their gardens sprayed because it is indiscriminate. Illness is much more
prevalent among banana workers than in other agricultural sectors. But unemployment in
Cameroon is 60 per cent, so you even find graduates working on banana plantations. Workers
feel exploited, but if they complain about bad conditions there are people out there who will fill
their jobs like a shot. So employers can do whatever they want. If you get too vocal as a shop
steward, then you might be sacked.’
It is not surprising that transnational companies, taking advantage of free-trade rhetoric, will
choose to locate banana production in countries where ‘production costs’ (wages, social
conditions, environmental standards, etc) are at their least onerous. Their rapaciousness has been
intensified of late as they are put under the screw by the new lords of the banana trade: the large
supermarket chains. These retailers increasingly set the terms of trade with producers by
demanding ever lower prices. They also impose ‘quality’ standards designed to ensure a uniform,
blemishfree fruit: standards that perpetuate the intensive systems in which virtually all bananas
are currently grown. No wonder then that on many banana plantations these days, more
money is spent on pesticides than on wages.
Bananas are the single biggest profit-making item sold in UK supermarkets today. This is despite
the fact that the supermarkets use them as a highprofile bargain to place a halo of low price
around everything they sell. In 2002 Asda Wal-Mart started a banana price war. You can now buy
a kilo of bananas for as little as 65 pence. Before 2002, the price was around £1.
Consumers might not be so enthusiastic about these bargain bananas if they understood just how
miserable the conditions are in which most of them are grown. Supermarkets still expect to make
a margin of up to 40 per cent on them. And predictably it is the banana workers in producer
countries who suffer, in terms of worsening working conditions, to make sure such margins are
reconcilable with low prices for the consumer. Alistair Smith, of the fair-trade NGO Banana Link,
sums up the situation as follows: ‘The “promise’ of free trade leads, in practice, to a driving down
of prices and squeezing out of smaller producers, forcing down wages and cutting social
benefits, more trade union repression, less job security, and increasing damage to the
environment and human health.’
Unless the British government stands up and fights their case, the ethical, small-scale banana
producers of the Caribbean will be forced out of business, and the pay and conditions on the
corporate plantations poised to completely replace them will decline even further.
Joanna Blythman is the author of Shopped: the shocking power of British supermarkets (Harper
Perennial, £7.99).
Some stats…
■ In 1995 the average use of pesticides in Costa Rica’s banana plantations was 44 kilograms per
hectare per year, compared to an average 2.7 kilograms per hectare per year for crops in
industrialised countries.
■ The chemicals used on corporate banana plantations include at least four classified by the World
Health Organisation as extremely hazardous (the strongest classification), including paraquat, and
three organophosphates not approved for use in the UK.
■ Pesticide poisoning rates in Costa Rica are three times higher in the banana regions than in the
rest of the country. Cases of sterility and cancers are increasingly frequent among
workers.