March
2002
Banana
Split: Conventional vs. Forest Farming
By Tim Keating
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The history of imports of timber, minerals and agricultural products
from the tropics is the history of colonialism, slavery and genocide.
Gold, silver, tin, copper, aluminum and oil…mahogany, lauan, teak
and other woods…beef, cocoa, coffee, sugar, coconuts—all
have an ugly legacy that continues to this day. They have been joined
in
more recent times by products such as diamonds, soybeans and coltane
(a mineral used in cell phone screens).
By far the king of tropical agriculture is the banana. Native to Asia
and first cultivated there, bananas were transported to parts of the
Middle East and Africa by Arabian traders who brought them along to
be eaten on their long caravan trips as valuable food. Alexander the
Great found them being grown in India in 327 BC.
The name by which the fruit is known in almost all languages was given
to it by the Arabs: banan means “finger” in Arabic. They
also started the massive plantations around 700 CE, during their rule
over
the Canary Islands, supplying most of Europe with bananas.
Bananas were first cultivated in the New World in the early 16th century,
brought by missionaries to the island the Spanish invaders had named
Hispaniola (“Spanish Island,” now the Dominican Republic and
Haiti). Thus began a brutal era in colonization, forest destruction
and resource extraction for export. Vast plantations invaded the forests
of the Caribbean and other tropical areas in America, generating enormous
wealth for the colonial masters of these “Banana Republics.”
By the late 1900s bananas had gained popularity to become the world’s
favorite fruit. Today, they are grown in large-scale monocultural plantations—from
Thailand to Africa to South America—for export around the world.
Until very recently, Costa Rica had been the largest producer of bananas
for the U.S. market. It has now been eclipsed by Ecuador—the latest
banana frontier.
The industry has always been abusive to workers and to the land, and
has always moved profits out of the country of origin. Perhaps the
most
insidious problem is the more recent chemical contamination that comes
from massive applications of biocides—nematocides, fungicides and
pesticides. According to a 1997 report by the Costa Rican Health Ministry,
an average of 6.5 kg of pesticides per capita are used in Costa Rica
every year—far more than in any other Central American country—with
banana crops being the biggest consumers.
Not only has the land and water been contaminated, but the workers
have suffered as well. A class action law suit was filed in the early
1980s
by 10,000 Costa Rican men having been left sterile due to contact with
the now-banned chemical DECP, a common fungicide used by the industry
in the 1970s. The suit was settled in 1997 with the industry paying
an average of only $7,000 to each victim. In addition, many workers’
children have been born with horrible genetic deformities. As reported
in the Tico Times, a recent study by the Health Research Institute (INISA)
of the University of Costa Rica found that women’s genes are being
damaged by overexposure to pesticides. Researchers found about twice
the amount of genetic damage—fractured chromosomes and broken DNA
molecules—among the plant workers compared with those of women
who have never worked in agriculture.
Despite this, aerial spraying continues indiscriminately in many plantations,
with nearby worker settlements—where women and kids live—regularly
getting soaked by pesticide clouds. Women are also contaminated as they
wash their family’s clothes, which still carry toxic residues
from the workday. And it is mostly women who work in the processing
plants,
handling bananas just in from the chemicalized fields as well as spraying
them with a final application of fungicide before packing. The researchers
also discovered that many of the women in the packaging plants had
never
been told what they were spraying on the bananas and were unaware of
the risks to which they were being exposed.
Forest Bananas in Talamanca
Valley
From Carrie McCracken—now Rainforest Relief’s Banana Project
Coordinator in Costa Rica—we learned about the history of production
in the Talamanca region.
The Chiriqui Land Company, a subsidiary of United Fruit Company, entered
the Costa Rican Valle de Talamanca in 1909. The forests of the Valley
were cleared, and in their place bananas, cocoa, and bamboo were planted.
This colonization of the Valley was met with some resistance by the
local people. Not willing to become integrated into the activities of
the company, many of the indigenous residents fled to the highlands
of the Cordillera.
Floods and crop diseases in the 1920s and ‘30s, and again in the
1940s, led to great losses for the company. The failure of industrial
production in the region prompted the original inhabitants to resettle
the area. The land they encountered, however, was completely different
from the land they left: The forests had been removed, the rivers altered,
new crops introduced, the soil destroyed, and Spanish-speaking workers
from Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica now populated the Valley.
The loss of the cocoa crop to the monilla virus in 1978—brought
about to some extent by the introduction of modern agricultural techniques
such as the use of chemicals—prompted a search for alternatives.
A government study indicated that the bananas being grown among the
cocoa were of a sufficient quantity of to support purée production
(for juice and baby food), leading growers to create coops for growing
fruit for purée and dried export.
In 1977, Indigenous Law No. 6162 was passed which set aside 62,000 hectares
as the Talamanca Indigenous Reserve for the Bribri and Cabecar Indians
of the region, ending the threat of reoccupation by the banana industry
and granting Talamancans control of their land. The law also stated
that all natural resources of the region were owned by the state and
the indigenous community.
Bananas are once again common in Talamanca—but there is a great
split between the shade-grown, organic, coop-produced fruit, and that
grown on the conventional, toxic and erosive monocultural plantations.
Having been concerned with and raising awareness about the negative
impact of industrial banana production for over a decade, Rainforest
Relief staff were recently able to begin actual work on the ground on
this critical issue last year. We recruited environmentalist Carrie
McCracken, who had spent months investigating and working with the four
Talamanca coops (coops are democratic decision-making bodies made up
of individual or indigenous growers) and with Foro Emaus (Emaus Forum,
a coalition of religious, labor and environmental groups opposing abuses
by industrial banana growers).
I and other staff members of Rainforest Relief visited
the area last fall when Carrie introduced us to some of the coop members
on their fincas (farms) and arranged tours with conventional growers
Dole and Chiquita. The differences we found were starkly evident.
While there may have been some improvements made by programs like Rainforest
Alliance’s “Better Banana” and the International Standards
Organization’s 14001 certifications, the majority of the banana
industry still sprays plantations dozens of times in a nine-month growing
season with highly toxic chemicals, often with workers still in the
fields. Workers who try to unionize are still blacklisted. The companies
make sure that workers can’t get vested by moving them around every
three months.
Even newly-Better-Banana-certified plantations are moonscapes of eroded
soil, devoid of anything but chemical-laden banana “trees”
(actually, bananas don’t grow on trees, but are the fruit of the
world’s largest herb, Musa sapientum).
Having cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of rainforests for their
initial planting, the industrial plantations lose about a centimeter
of soil a year, which washes into the rivers and creeks, drained from
the plantations by massive ditches. This soil has choked most of the
lowland rivers of the country and is destroying coral reefs off the
coasts. Then there’s banana waste, which includes a large percentage
of the crop and is typically just dumped in piles or pits, creating
even more problems.
The coops, on the other hand, have standards for organic production,
for the density of bananas per acre, for the density of shade trees
per acre, for the percentage of one’s land under cultivation, even
for non-genetically engineered varieties.
When one enters a coop banana finca, at first it may be hard to distinguish
it from natural regrowth—then one spots the bananas in amongst
the second growth forest. Then the cacao trees. And, after a time, one
may, if one knows what to look for, spot the vanilla, the manioc, the
laurel trees and other cultivated plants. But the floor of the forest
is covered with leaves and branches and roots—never plowed or cleared.
It’s cool under the shade of the canopy. There are sounds of birds
and insects everywhere. If you’re careful, you may spot a harlequin
frog—one of the flashy and famous poison dart frogs of the region.
Massive old growth trees are interspersed among the younger fruit-bearing
trees.
José is a member of one of the four coops and was proud to show
us his finca. He has cultivated only about seven acres of flat bottomland
of the 70 total acres he owns. The rest was purposely left as montaña—their
term for natural forest. José knows how important the montaña
is to his farm—for food, water retention, soil stability, a haven
for wildlife that fertilizes and pollinates his crops.
He showed us how he uses the laurel—a fast-growing native tree
that made up some of the shade—for wood. His barn, stockade and
cacao drier were made of laurel that he had planted and cut on his finca.
But the continued existence of this alternative is never guaranteed
as the economics of the coops is currently tenuous at best. Carrie remains
in Costa Rica, coordinating our project with the coops, working to increase
their markets and help them break into exports, thus enabling them to
have a more secure income. We will be approaching companies in the U.S.
that use banana purée or pieces to help connect them to the coops.
Once this is done Rainforest Relief will begin a campaign to convince
U.S. banana companies Dole, Chiquita and Del Monte to shift their production
to shade-grown, organic and fair trade or lose their markets.
Tim Keating is co-founder and Executive Director of Rainforest
Relief, a New-York-based organization that works through education and
direct-action campaigns to reduce the demand for wood and other products
which are driving the destruction of rainforests worldwide. To learn
more about Rainforest Relief and its banana campaign, contact (718)
398-3760 or relief@igc.org.
Rainforest Relief will host a slide show and discussion on the Costa
Rica banana industry, “Banana Split: Conventional Bananas vs. Forest
Bananas,” Friday, March 22, 7:30 p.m. at the Patagonia Store, 101
Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring Streets, NYC.
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