Grupo Noboa S.A., Guayaquil, Ecuador  

The Noboa family group of 110 companies is the largest corporate conglomerate in Ecuador, and belongs to twice-failed Presidential candidate, Alvaro Noboa, one of Latin America’s richest men. The group is involved in agriculture, commodity trading, banking, mining and sea transport, amongst other sectors. Known for its Bonita brand, under which it markets other fruit products as well as bananas, Noboa is the biggest producer and exporter of bananas in Ecuador. With the increase of Ecuadorian exports, the volume Noboa controls has increased significantly. The company now controls around 9% of the world banana market.

The great majority of plantation workers in Ecuador, the world's biggest banana exporting country, remain unorganised.This translates into much lower labour costs. Typically, banana growers like Noboa, rely on sub-contracting and loopholes in the labour laws to make it difficult to organise unions. In 2002, workers on Noboa's giant Los Alamos plantation started organising the first new independent trade unions in Ecuador in 20 years. It emerged that Noboa created over 30 phantom sub-contracting companies, each with less than 30 workers, so as to avoid unionisation (30 is the minimum number required to register a union). At Los Alamos plantation in May 2002, the company hired over 200 arled men to break up a legal strike by workers. The violence left 19 injured and one man without his leg.

After this violent incident Noboa resorted to firing union leaders at Los Alamos. Only a hunger strike outside the Labour Ministry in July 2003 forced the company to pay reasonable levels of compensation to leaders sacked after they had presented a formal list of grievances in the labour courts. In October 2003, the company sacked 333 workers from four of its other plantations in one fell swoop after it found out that they had attended training workshops on labour law and union organisation. Alvaro Noboa has openly declared: "I don't like unions, and will fight them".

The Ecuadorian government sets a minimum price that exporters must pay to producers for each box of bananas. This law is often flouted - exporters pay sometimes as low as US$0.80/box, whilst production costs are at least US$2.50/box. Small producers are afraid to complain because they could also be blacklisted by the exporters, without whom they would have no access to the market. But producers like Noboa, who regularly flout the legal minimum price, seem to have impunity, as they do when it comes to complying with national labour laws.

The company does not publish publicly available accounts or other detailed information. The banana division, Exportadora Bananera Noboa, is one of the largest exporters to the European market, and has grown in importance since 1993. Noboa owns the biggest shipping operation in the banana industry. Noboa's exports are the most diversified of all the big companies with big volumes also being shipped to Japan, New Zealand and South East Asia as well as North America, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East and the 'Southern Cone' of South America.

The agricultural division of Exportadora Bananera Noboa owns over 7,000 hectares of its own banana production, with some of the highest productivity in the industry (averaging 2,800 boxes per hectare per year). Apart from these ten giant 'haciendas' of its own, Noboa also buys from some 600 'Associated Producers' covering 36,600 hectares. The company is therefore responsible for around 25% of Ecuador's banana exports, although it had shipped over 50% in the past. Noboa has made some investment in limited environmental improvements in response to supermarket requirements especially in Europe, but presides over some of the poorest labour conditions in the international industry.

On several occasions since the all-time low prices of 1999-2000, Noboa has been sanctioned by the Ecuadorian government for paying prices to producers which were well below the legal minimum. Producers continue to complain into 2001 that Noboa, in common with other exporters, does not respect the minimum price when export levels are high. In 2005, it was fined over US$200,000 fro non-payment of the government-fixed minimum price, but the company is still disputing it in court.

In January 2001, one of Grupo Noboa's subsidiaries, Indrizo S.A., acquired 7.58 per cent of the shares of troubled Chiquita.

In 2005, a first meeting took place, in the margins of the second International Banana Conference, between company representatives, FENACLE (the federation organising banana plantation workers since 2001) and the International Union of Food and Agricultural Workers(IUF). Since then Noboa /Bonita has played an active role in getting 56 workers reinstated on one of its supplier farms, the Primavera Plantation. The workers had been fired during a strike. The company also sought to intervene in a labour conflict in another of its supplier farms.

While many have been encouraged that Noboa has been prepared to participate in the multi-stakeholder process of resolution (with the new trade unions affiliated to FENACLE - as well as with North American and European civil society organisations like US/LEAP and Banana Link - the company has indicated that it is willing to hold its suppliers to adherence to Ecuadorian labour law only and not to international labour standards. Nor is the company prepared to defend the right to form trade unions.  However, on 29th June 2006 the Ecuadorian congress finally approved new legislation on labout subcontracting (terciarisation).  It fixes the percentage of workers who can be subcontracted on a plantation to 50% maximum of the total workforce.

Also see the Ecuador Pages of the Campaigns Section of this website for information about Noboa owned plantations.

Websites

The Noboa Section on the US LEAP Website

Billionaires Slippery Situation - Forbes.com Article by Michael Freedman, 17/March/2003: Denied by his late father, Alvaro Noboa finally won control of the family's banana business in Ecuador. The cost: embittered siblings and $20 million in legal fees.