Celebrating Banana Day 2021 …

The argument between producers and distributors concerning banana prices is not about to go away

Growers are insisting, rightly, that if the market wants living wages, decent contracts and working conditions, as well as positive environmental impacts at the production end, then this has to be reflected in prices that cover the costs, with a margin for investment in what buyers and consumers actually want.

“Shared responsibility” is the watchword; and bananas can no longer be treated as a loss leader whose buying price can be infinitely squeezed.

The TR4 threat hanging over the whole industry is just one symptom of a production system that has reached its limits. New varieties and diversified agroecological methods are not a utopian luxury, but need to be explored as a way out of multiple crises that affect all those whose livelihoods depend on the trade.

Growers are now presenting a united front, and this is encouraging. The exporting countries and their producers could take measures to control supply, but buyers urgently need to play their part and understand that all the economic, social and environmental issues affecting the industry are interlinked. Trying to resolve one set of issues without seeing the whole picture will not lead to sustainable bananas for all. Keeping buying prices down is ultimately the surest way of causing the collapse of the whole industry.

Consumers in many countries have led the way in giving the banana sector the biggest Fairtrade market share in Europe with around 10 per cent, and a rapidly growing organic share. Nearly one in eight bananas sold in North America last year were organic, for example. This should be a signal to the big buyers that they can go further, as we are no longer talking about market ‘niches’ for organic and Fairtrade.

For years, Banana Link has sought to alert key players and consumers not only to what is wrong – and all the negative impacts of the current banana system – but also to what can be done to put the industry on a different track.

It is finally emerging from the scientific community that the only solutions to managing the TR4 disease probably lie in soil management, feeding soils biologically rather than chemically. But the investment that is required to make the transition on a large scale can only be made if the industry makes a united effort.

Many banana scientists are ready to support a transition. Many banana companies see the writing on the wall for the conventional Cavendish monoculture, even if they are not comfortable saying so publicly. Many workers are ready to contribute to these efforts on a daily basis if producers accept that they cannot go it alone without the participation of their workforce.

The question is no longer whether to act or what to do, but rather how and when. The World Banana Forum provides the space to work this out. The price of not heeding all the signals would be much higher than investing in genuinely sustainable bananas.

Although made a few years ago, this video explains how the supermarkets have, and continue to drive down banana prices at the expense of workers and farmers.

The banana industry is an important source of local employment for people who live in the banana producing regions of Latin America, West Africa and the Caribbean. Local communities depend on this work, and it is common for workers to live on the plantation too, in company provided accommodation. In many areas, work on the banana plantation represents the main, if not only, source of local employment. However, it is an industry that is still dominated by male workers, who represent 87.5% of employees in Latin American plantations, 83.1% in the West African industry and 60-65% in the Caribbean (excluding Dominican Republic).

As such, women’s economic inclusion and empowerment is dependent on changes being made within the banana industry. The situation is even more urgent where there’s a prevalence of women headed households. Research has found that in Latin America, for example, women- headed households are a common family structure, particularly in Colombia, where approximately 70% of women plantation workers identify themselves as heads of household, either because they are single mothers or because their partners do not contribute financially to the home. It is urgent that women who are the sole breadwinner for their dependents must not be excluded from the main source of employment in their community.

Women’s exclusion from employment opportunities has many complex reasons including patriarchal norms around the roles of men as financial providers and women as responsible for unpaid reproductive and domestic work. This drives the discrimination against women workers on the basis that they are more expensive and less reliable, as they will inevitably need to take time off to have babies, with a maternity leave cost implication, or to care for sick children, which is inconvenient to the employer.

Women’s work outside the home has not been valued equally to that of men, and in some cases, women still receive lower pay for the same work; in others they are confined to certain areas of the production system- typically the packhouse- since other work is deemed ‘too hard’ or ‘too technical’ for women, and this is a contributing factor to the gender pay gap. The reality that work systems and processes have been set up to suit the male worker is not given due consideration. Sexual harassment and gender based violence are also prevalent issues in many banana producing countries. The fact that women are underrepresented in the banana industry, and that when they are able to secure work, it is often on temporary, insecure contracts, is an aggravating factor.

Underlying the inequitable experience of women banana workers compared to their male counterparts, are trends in our global banana supply chain. Retail price-wars mean the profit margins of producing companies in most banana producing countries are so narrow that there is very little room for manoeuvring to make improvements in the workplace and provide equitable working conditions for all workers. In order to meaningfully address the issue of gender equity in the banana industry, there needs to be a recognition among large retailers that squeezing the profit margins of producers is at direct odds with their ability to make progressive changes including the ability to meaningfully promote women’s rights.

Gender is a cross-cutting theme, embedded in all areas of Banana Link’s work. We work strategically to promote women’s employment and empowerment through multi-stakeholder forums such as the World Banana Forum, where we co-coordinate the Gender-Equity Task Force, In 2020, this role saw Banana Link coordinate a series of webinars focusing on four key issues for women banana workers- women’s OHS, gender based violence and sexual harassment, the gender pay gap and initiatives to support women with negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The webinar series was an important tool for sharing good practice and laying foundations for communal strategies and work in the future.

Banana Link is committed to improving and increasing women’s employment in the Banana Industry. In recent years, Banana Link and the IUF have worked with Compagnie Frutiere on initiatives to tackle the disproportionately low levels of women’s employment on their subsidiary Golden Exotics Ltd (GEL) banana plantation in Ghana. The project identified barriers to women’s employment, in consultation with women workers. Measures included undertaking a gender specific health and safety risks assessment and implementing recommendations such as redesigning packhouses to better suit women workers, the introduction of a creche to support nursing/breastfeeding mothers , support and training for women’s career development, and greater involvement of women in collective bargaining, and outreach into local communities to raise awareness of employment opportunities and address misconceptions about working on the plantation for women. As a consequence, there has been a marked increase in the numbers of women employed at GEL. Between 2018 and 2020, women’s employment increased by 50%, from 8-12% of the overall banana workforce. In the organic production women now represent more than 20% of workers, more than double the percentage in January 2018.

The BOHESI occupational health and safety gender guidelines for Ghana were later developed; and building on that work, this year will see new gender guidelines for Latin America and also Cameroon, where gender responsive OHS training and measures are already being developed. Drawing on the BOHESI guidelines to develop training opportunities that empower women and challenge negative gender stereotypes, and to push forwards the implementation of gender responsive OHS and working practices, are key strategies for change.

Banana Link has worked collaboratively with partners in other international supply chains to develop a comprehensive resource of case studies on good practice within the banana and other agricultural industries, with the finding that three important areas influenced the experience of women in global supply chains, and form the principles of our work on gender equity in the export banana trade:

1. an ‘Enabling Environment’ (including gender appropriate OHS, provision for childcare, maternity leave and breastfeeding breaks, legislation as a key driver of change, and the sharing of learning in multi-stakeholder fora);
2. Education (of women, to build their leadership skills, provide role models and empower women with knowledge of their rights, and the whole workforce on acceptable and unacceptable behaviours)
3. Representation (the role of unions to advocate for change, and the importance of women’s involvement in unions, and the importance of trusted grievance mechanisms and platforms where women’s voices can be heard, and of women in leadership positions).

In March 2021, The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the ETC Group published a report – A Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045 – on the tipping point at which the agri-food sector finds itself, underlining the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated the developments that have led to this crucial juncture for the future of global agriculture.

The report explores two very different futures for food systems over the next 45 years and finds that an ‘Agri-business-as-Usual’ scenario would be catastrophic. The results of this possible evolution, according to the report, include technology taking over supply chains in support of extreme value extraction and consumer manipulation by large corporations, along with the near-obsoletion of human as workers and producers in these chains.

The report explains that the developments within this scenario will not be benefit producers, farmers, the environment, or the consumers’ health and knowledge of supply chains.

Against this theory of a fairly disastrous business-as-usual scenario, the report then examines the possible pathways and impacts of a contrasting “Civil society as Unusual” scenario. The report describes this scenario as being rooted in in deep, organised and effective collaboration between civil society organisations (CSOs), leading to a ‘Long Food Movement’ which reclaims food systems and the agri-food industry, including its frameworks and processes. The general approach of a Long Food Movement, as described in the report, consists of four “ingredients”: 1) collaborating across multiple scales; 2) broadening alliances and restructuring relationships; 3) connecting long-range commitment to wide range ‘horizon scanning’; and 4) being ready for change and disruption.

As part of this “Civil society as Unusual” scenario, the report suggests four ‘Pathways’ and a total of thirteen ‘Opportunities’:

The conclusion of the report is a declaration of faith in civil society’s ‘huge untapped potential for deep, transformative change’, and a call to action for CSOs to ‘get increasingly organized, proactive, and forward-thinking’.

The report presents a firm belief that transformation towards a Long Food Movement is both possible and necessary to protect food systems by mitigating climate change, biodiversity loss, the decline of soil fertility, widespread hunger, and the dislocation of societies.

This Long Food Movement consists above all of a real commitment to deep, effective and comprehensive collaboration between civil society organisations to ensure that, collectively, civil society takes control of every opportunity listed as part of the four pathways.

For the Banana Industry, this means widening the lens through which we view the possible improvements of labour rights, human rights and environmental protection. This entails, not only considering and making a strong commitment to innovative or alternative approaches, but also thinking of opportunities to collaborate with organisations and groups which tackle issues though entirely different but complementary angles.

The pathways and associated opportunities outlined in the report by the IPES-Food panel and the ETC Group offer a highly useful and rich “checklist” of approaches through which the protection of food systems can be achieved. It is therefore up to CSOs to identify current gaps in their field (i.e., missed opportunities or insufficiently explored pathways) as well as prospects for essential collaboration between organisations and relevant actors.