Bananas

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Personally, I’ve never liked them.  My mother used to call the brown spots in the middle “monkeys.”  (Those monkeys were really gross, Mom.) 

I seem to remember that there were always bananas in our kitchen, and most of the time they overstayed their welcome.  After day number x of their residency on our counter, they’d start to turn, morphing into something worse than their originally offensive form, slowly bruising and browning their way to their next destination: our freezer.  Those bananas that were unfortunate enough to make it to this stage were exiled to the freezer, set aside with a future as key ingredients in banana bread or my Grandma Brown’s old and nearly perfect banana cake.  Sometimes the freezer was so full of sad and brown bananas that there was little room left for my then-favorite freezer-dwellers: pot pies, tater tots, and Cool Whip.

Sometimes I’ll eat a banana because I know it's good for me.  They have potassium (however, one of my favorite facts is that celery, potatoes, and avocados contain just as much, if not more, potassium per serving than bananas).  They smell nice, like far-away places.  Everyone else seems to like them.  But mostly I limit the time I spend in the presence of bananas. 

In a seemingly unrelated tangent, I’d like to mention the English conversation course I’ve organized for interested professors at the Universidad Tecnica de Cotopaxi.  I offer two different sessions once a week as an opportunity for English instructors to improve their comprehension and oral expression of English through conversation.  My favorite topics thus far have included the national preference to study English over Kichwa (a.k.a. Quechua/Quichua, the ancestral language of the Andes), the internal impression of Ecuador’s external debt, and the apparently corrupt nature of the cacao and banana industries.  This last subject prompted further conversation and research into the issues involved in the production and export of my least favorite fruit.

The professors in my conversation class brought up a few disturbing points regarding the Ecuadorian banana industry: child labor is a pillar of the industry, the economic condition of the entire country exists as a function of the price of exported bananas, and the richest man in Ecuador (Alvaro Noboa) is the high-profile owner of a 3,000-acre banana plantation in Puerto Inca (in the Guayas province of the country).  A similar set of facts defines the country’s (and the world’s) cacao industry.

Rather than restating portions of well-written articles, I will provide links (below) to a few documents that point out some pretty powerful incentives to think before you buy bananas in the United States.  If your bananas are cheap at the local Fred Meyer or Wal-Mart or Safeway, it should come as a shock.  Consider, first of all, the distance that they had to travel before arriving at your local supermarket.  This cost alone should drive up the price of bananas significantly.  Consider next the fact that workers in this industry are often paid a deplorably meager daily wage to facilitate the lowest possible selling prices.  Labor laws regarding wage, working conditions, and the age of employable children are often disregarded and ignored without penalty.  To meet discerning aesthetic standards and to produce a uniform, traditionally appealing crop of fruit, growers rely on the heavy use of harmful, dangerous pesticides and fungicides.  When they travel from the plantation to their country of import, bananas are shipped in large, climate-controlled containers long before they are ripe.  Once at their destination, they are sprayed with a chemical ripening agent (ethylene) and then delivered to supermarkets for sale.  That, to me, does not sound delicious.

The lives of approximately 383,000 Ecuadorians (the 2007 estimate) are directly and intimately linked to the banana industry.  These are the workers of large plantations and smaller, family-run farms.  To learn about the social issues that emerge with regularity from the corruption within the industry, read this
article (it's worth your time): Science Creative Quarterly

On November 25 (Thanksgiving Day…delicious), local newspapers reported that the Ecuadorian banana laws have been reformed and revitalized in an attempt to minimize illegal production of one of the country’s most important exports.  By mandating fixed prices for produce and requiring all growers to register with the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, the government hopes to employ effective regulation of the industry:

Banana law for 2011 will regularize illegal banana plantations, establish fixed prices for the entire year, strengthen penalties for exporters who fail to pay the official price of the box of the fruit, among other actions.

Richard Salazar, Banana Unit** director from the Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Ministry (Magap), said yesterday that the reforms will help the industry because “there are currently 110 000 hectares of illegal banana plantations, which represent 115 million cases per year and it means that half of fruit exports is not legalized.”  (Ecuador Times, 25 Nov. 2010)

** It should be noted that director of the "Banana Unit" is a pretty rad title.  You're lucky Mr. Salazar.  Lucky.

We’ll see. 

In the meantime, friends and family, I urge you to read a few of these articles and learn where your bananas are coming from.  There’s a really strong chance they’re coming straight from Ecuador.  If not, very poor, very tired families in Colombia, Costa Rica, or Honduras are to thank.  Consider searching out Fair Trade certified bananas.  If you do, you can rest assured that the workers who cultivated and harvested the fruit were paid a fair salary, worked reasonable hours, and were not under the age of 14.  They were not needlessly exposed to dangerous chemicals or otherwise hazardous substances.  Their exporters paid a fair price for the product, and their country’s economy was bolstered legally and legitimately. 

And if you do continue to purchase bananas of questionable or condemnable origin, please eat them all up and don’t let them grow nasty and brown on your kitchen counter.  Quietly thank the people who made them available to you, and consider a better course of action for the future.  And if they do happen to turn brown before you can eat them, please make delicious banana bread or cake and share it with someone you love.   

Further reading on the topic:

• New York Times article, 2002
• "Blood on the Bananas"
• Global Exchange
• Fair Trade USA
• Fair Trade Labeling Organization (FLO)
• USLEAP