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Now Playing: Big Banana & The Drug Lords As big box megamarket chains demand lower banana prices, the big banana producers continue to cut costs and reverse human rights hard-won by unions in Central America and Colombia. In recent years, the big three banana giants: Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita, have all cut jobs, wages and benefits, and closed down plantations. As a result, industry watchers tell us there is a "race to the bottom" with production concentrating in low-wage, non-union Ecuador and in the south coast of Guatemala putting on pressure to lower standards held by union plantations elsewhere. As standards fall, the situation gets poisonous for everybody. Large-scale plantations pump up productivity and dump more pesticides on the crops while ignoring the health and welfare of workers. The resulting misery and poverty creates the social context for terrorism. That's right, earlier this year Chiquita Brands International, formerly known as The United Fruit Company* was charged with doing business with a organization in Colombia that the US had designated as a terrorist group. Documents filed in the case asserted the company had in effect been paying millions in protection money for its employees to the right-wing paramilitary organization known as the AUC, which has its roots in the paramilitary armies built up to protect the private interests of drug lords who now own vast tracts of Columbia. While prosecutors also alleged that the company had a similar arrangement with the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the message of ethical indifference is clear. But the picture is not all so bleak. Earlier this year Whole Foods announced that henceforth it will source all its bananas from Earth University a high quality, low-impact, socially-responsible banana farm in Costa Rica. But the real capacity for change lies with the next generation of sustainable shoppers who by creating a new set of food-values with their dollars will take Fair Trade to the next level. * The United Fruit Company, established at the dawn of the 20th century, was a major American corporation that traded tropical fruit (primarily bananas and pineapples) grown in Third World plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. It was considered by critics to be an archetypal example of the influence of a multinational corporation on the internal politics of the so-called "banana republics." In 1984, the company was renamed Chiquita Brands International.-from Wikipedia |