For over the three decades Banana Link has made a significant contribution to making tropical fruit export production more ethical and sustainable. Below is a summary of just some of our major achievements in that time.
Living wages, empowered trade unions and social dialogue
For many workers on banana plantations their working lives are characterised by working long hours for wages that are inadequate to meet their cost-of-living needs. An industry where every worker in the supply chain receives a living wage has been central to Banana Link’s vision since its inception, and that the key to achieving it is through empowered trade unions engaged in social dialogue and mature industrial relations with employers.
It is only in recent years that there has been concerted momentum within the industry to work towards the payment of living wages for plantation workers. This has include a number of European retailers – principally in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and United Kingdom – making public commitments to work towards ensuring that workers in their banana supply chains are paid living wages.
Empowering trade unions to effectively negotiate living wages and other improvements to their working conditions over many years has been a key element for Banana Link. Their Union-to-Union programme has built links between the trade unions in Latin America that organise plantation workers directly with the British and French unions organising workers at the other end of tropical fruit value chains.
Banana Link coordinated a campaign that led to the first ever framework agreement between a multinational corporation (Chiquita) and trade unions in the Latin American agricultural sector, which guaranteed minimum labour standards and trade union rights.
Training and empowerment programmes in specific regions, such as that in Ghana and Cameroon successfully empowered unions and their representatives to secure wage increases and improve working conditions, which also led to the creation of the first African network of banana workers unions.
More recently, Banana Link conducted field research among banana plantation workers in Ecuador’s El Oro region which found that most workers say their salary is inadequate to meet their family’s needs, as a contribution towards European retailers meeting their commitments on Living Wages.
Banana Link coordination also contributed to the establishment of a roadmap for negotiating living wages in the banana industry of Côte d’Ivoire signed by banana companies, workers unions, retailers, state actors and ILO under framework of Decent Work and Shared Responsibility.
Constructive dialogue among industry stakeholders
It has always been an objective of Banana Link to promote constructive dialogue between all economic and non-economic stakeholders to accelerate a transition to fair, equitable and sustainable banana and pineapple chains worldwide.
Banana Link and its partners in the global South drove the creation of the World Banana Forum in 2009, a multi-stakeholder initiative that brings together producers, their organisations, trade unions, cooperatives, exporter groups, fresh producing companies, retailers, traders, consumer associations, governments, research institutions, universities and civil society organizations. This major achievement came out of a huge effort to bring players together around the civil society agenda in two big international conferences in Brussels in 1998 and 2005.
Gender equity and women’s empowerment
Banana Link has always striven to promote gender equality in the banana trade through several different initiatives. These include a series of working papers for the World Banana Forum’s Gender Equity Task Force , analysing the participation of women workers and small producers in the global banana industry, including recommendations towards the provision of Decent Work and sustainable livelihoods for these women actors.
Banana Link also organised two multi-stakeholder meetings on Gender Equity in the Banana Industry to develop strategies to increase and improve women’s economic engagement in the banana industry, alongside the publication of Progress Towards Gender Equity in The Banana Industry: Summaries of Case Studies.
Meanwhile, Banana Link has also worked on the ground to address gender inequality, such as a project in Ghana to improve and increase women’s employment, which saw women’s employment increased by 50%, from 8-12% of the overall banana workforce in two years at Golden Exotics Limited, and an increase in the number of women in supervisory roles on the plantation.
Occupational Health & Safety
Promoting better health and safety practices and education for workers on plantations has been another major strand of Banana Link’s work over the years.
Their most significant contribution being made through a coordinating role in the World Banana Forum’s Banana Occupational Health and Safety Initiative (BOHESI), which brought together government, companies, producers, certifiers, trade unions and NGOs to improve Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) prevention, management, and control mechanisms at the plantation level.
Banana Link were responsible for coordination of OHS training manuals for use in Ecuador and Cameroon, that have formed the basis of plantation training programmes in both countries.
Banana Link has subsequently adapted these manuals for its own independent OHS programme in Ghana, which has included the production of Guidelines On Healthy And Safe Employment Of Women In The Ghanaian Banana Industry, and seen them pioneer a worker led OHS risk assessment methodology.
Small farmers and agroecology
Sustainable production systems which reduce dependence on hazardous substances and minimise adverse health and environmental impacts on natural resources, workers and communities, including the promotion of South-South exchanges of learning and experience, has always been another key objective of Banana Link.
To this end, Banana Link established the International Alliance for Sustainable Family Farming (IASFF), which brings together small family farming organisations, trade unions and civil society organisations to work towards the expansion of organic and agroecological agriculture with sustainable and fair farm-to-market programs that respect rights of farmers, workers and unions.
Banana Link has also sought to document and share examples of best practice in sustainable farming methods, such as organic production at Compagnie Fruitière’s Golden Exotics Limited plantation in Ghana in the video below.
Advocating and campaigning for change
Pressuring governments, European supermarkets and ethical certifying bodies to act to improve working conditions and farming practices in banana supply chains has also been a key element of Banana Link’s work.
This work has seen some significant achievements, such as the fact that three leading retailers in the UK – Sainsbury, the Co-operative Group and Waitrose – only sell Fairtrade bananas while virtually all other UK supermarkets have ethical banana buying policies.
Lobbying of the European Parliament through various campaigns, most notably the 2015 – 2018 Make Fruit Fair Campaign, contributed in part to the propagation of the European Union Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive adopted in 2024, which mandates will that companies identify and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts of their actions inside and outside Europe.
Banana Link lobbying also contributed to a strengthening of Fairtrade certification standards for workers. This included guaranteeing the right of workers freely to organise and collectively bargain, and gave workers more control over how to spend the Fairtrade premium. Fairtrade also introduced a new methodology to set living wage benchmarks and a clear process for plantations to progress towards a living wage.
Rethinking Value Chains
In 2016 Banana Link established the Rethinking Value Chains (RVC) collective that brought together civil society actors – including NGOs, trade unions, academic institutions – to provide a space to engage in fundamental discussions on the current dominating economic system (neo-liberalism) and ways in which we can work together towards sustainable alternatives that put people and the environment first.
Alongside this, Banana Link also coordinated the establishment of Rethinking Global Value Chains platform, in cooperation with the University of Montpellier, to enhance the visibility of research and teaching approaches that offer perspectives on responsible management in global value chains, while acknowledging the prominent role of social movements in making visible and debatable their social and environmental challenges.