Big Banana’s bitter labor truths

So, it’s with a certain amount of weariness that a reader might approach a new book about banana production in Ecuador, the world’s largest exporter of the world’s favorite fruit. Written by Ben Brisbois, a public health professor at the University of Montreal who’s been researching Ecuador’s banana workers since 2009, “Banana Capital” presents a history of the industry and the ways it’s grown and consolidated over the last century — quite literally on the backs of its laborers.

Most of Brisbois’s worker-related focus, though, is on the devastating health effects of exposure to pesticides like chlorpyrifos, which causes seizures, paralysis, lower IQ in children and death. Big banana companies like Dole, Chiquita and Del Monte have frequently sought to deflect blame for sickening their workers by implicating the workers themselves for not being diligent in their safety practices. In countries where the average banana worker makes less than $7,000 a year, it’s difficult to miss the cynicism behind this sort of tactic. Across all banana-producing countries and companies, “There isn’t enough PPE,” says Sandra Mendoza, Central American campaign lead for worker rights organization Global Labor Justice, referring to personal protective equipment like respirators, goggles and long-sleeved garments meant to shield workers from chemical harm.

Mendoza makes monthly visits to Costa Rica, which she calls “one of the hardest countries to organize,” in part because there are no places to sit down with workers: “You have to meet them outside when they come out on their breaks.” She says companies know full well “that they shouldn’t spray [pesticides] when workers are in the fields, or [they] should do it early in the morning before people are coming into the fields, or [they] have to look at which way the wind is blowing so that it doesn’t blow in the direction of the workers. But they continue to do it — that’s one of the more recurrent complaints that I hear.”

Brisbois sees companies’ refusal to provide adequate PPE, or even guarantee that crop dusters will avoid schools and homes and worker-filled fields, as part of a bigger corporate tendency toward what he calls the Plantationocene. This refers to the idea of the plantation as a monoculture model, where only a single crop, such as pineapples or sugarcane or bananas, are grown. But also, he says, in much the same way that parts in a factory are interchangeable, “The workers are interchangeable, and a banana from Honduras can be replaced on the shelf by a banana from Guatemala.” In other words, any sick or injured worker can easily be replaced by another worker; if there’s costly labor or environmental trouble in one country, fruit from another can easily be substituted. “A plantation is a technology for generating wealth based on controlling nature and other people,” Brisbois says.

In this sort of system, pesticide exposure is only one terrible problem among many. “I don’t even know if there’s an ethical banana company out there,” says Reid Maki, child labor advocacy director for the Child Labor Coalition. Ecuador, Belize, Nicaragua, Brazil (the world’s fourth largest banana producer), and the Philippines (the sixth largest producer and second largest exporter after Ecuador) all use child labor in their banana supply chains, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB).

Public awareness of the food system’s inequities is how we got labeling schemes that assure us that our chocolate bar was produced without slave labor or deforestation, or that the animals we eat were raised humanely, or that a worker-owned cooperative was behind our morning cup of coffee. But Maki says these sorts of labels — Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance, for example, are both meant to indicate social, economic and environmental standards — tend to deliver less than consumers would hope for, with abuses still rampant throughout supply chains. Herein lies a good amount of the exhaustion in considering, now, bananas. What consumer action could move that needle?

Probably not more of those labels we’ve come to rely on. Certifications are expensive, Brisbois says, which means only the big banana players can afford them. Fairtrade may protect some small farmers who have organized into cooperatives, but farmers with high ecological practices risk losing access to certification “if they don’t produce enough bananas, or enough that meet cosmetic quality standards,” says Brisbois. Additionally, in a move that alarmed labor and sustainability experts alike, third-party banana certifier Fairtrade International just announced a new CEO who’s worked for fossil fuel company BP and agrochemical company Bayer. This isn’t the sort of hire that encourages hope for positive change.

What might work, says Maki, is “if all of the banana workers in all of these countries were organized; they could do a banana strike and ask the companies to increase their wages above 50 percent. But there’s a lot of obstacles to organizing folks” in any one country, let alone all of them together. He doesn’t see much of a way around the challenges, other than for concerned consumers to write directly to banana companies and ask them to clean up their supply chains.

Adela Torries is coordinator of COLSIBA, which is the organizing body for all Latin America’s banana unions. She says her organization has had some successes in achieving collective bargaining agreements between workers and companies. But her advice to American consumers isn’t any more robust than Maki’s. As she wrote to FoodPrint (in Spanish), “Improve the payment for a box of bananas. That’s all you can do to improve working conditions.”