Banana Link’s International Coordinator blogs on the current pivotal moment in the trade’s 150 year old history that the highly concentrated and value-stripped banana industry is currently navigating. En español aquí / en français ici. Re-pu
blished in Fruitnet.com here.
"We need a change of mentality, a change of paradigm before it is too late"
This is not some small consumer country NGO with no commercial imperative verbalising its aspirations in a vacuum of public attention, or in a half-empty room ! No, it is the top leadership of two thirds of the world’s fresh dessert banana producers and exporting companies at the October 2024 Fruit Attraction trade fair four weeks ago in Madrid, in front of audiences of many of the other key industry players.
For the handful of civil society organisations who had made the journey to the Spanish capital, this united call from the world’s leading producing countries included many of the messages that a 20-strong delegation of the world’s independent trade union and small farmer organisation leaders had tried to transmit two years ago at the same trade fair. It was a matter of backs and faces to the wall ; only by working and planning together – from the lowest paid workers to the multiple retail company shareholders – could a real transformation be managed.
Way back in 1998 and 2005 in Brussels, then in 2009 in Rome, then in 2012 in Guayaquil, then in 2017 in Geneva, then back again in Rome at the fourth international conference of the 15-year old World Banana Forum (WBF) in March this year, the messages of organised civil society organisations with a stake or an interest in the plight of the international banana trade had been very clear : a socio-economic and ecological transformation of the sector was necessary and urgent, but that only a collective effort could pull producers and consumers through. Many of the strategic and thematic messages of trade unions, small farmers’ and civil society organisations have now been taken up by the leading industry player themselves.
Who were the main ‘messengers’ ?
Three literally electrifying panels at the trade fair’s biggest meeting venue were co-organised and co-hosted by the Latin American Banana Task Force and the FAO-based WBF secretariat.
We heard from the Ecuadorian ‘Banana Cluster’ of exporters and producers, Ecuador’s Agriculture Minister and major banana producer Daniel Palacios, the National Banana Corporation of Costa Rica (CORBANA), the leaders of both Colombian producer and exporters’ bodies (AUGURA and ASBAMA), together with their African and Caribbean counterparts representing the entire industry of West & Central Africa (AFRUIBANA) and the Dominican Republic (ADOBANANO).
Also, on one or more of the panels, were representatives of Dole Food Company and Chiquita Brands International, Fairtrade International e.V., the Latin American & Caribbean Fairtrade producers’ network (CLAC), as well as of the most widely used private standards and certification initiatives GlobalGAP and Rainforest Alliance.
What were their main messages ?
1. Fair prices for living remuneration of producers and workers
When African producers supplying the French learned a year ago that for the 2024 contract the world’s most globalised retailer (buying and re-selling on all continents) was cutting 2 euros off a box of organic Fairtrade bananas and 1 euro/box off conventional fruit, there was disgust; even despair. Losing market share to, on the one hand, France’s food retail market leader, and on the other to the ubiquitous German discounters, was the global retailer’s only real consideration in cutting over 10 per cent off the box price paid to suppliers. Never mind the social and environmental investments made over many years; never mind the public corporate responsability discourse!
The fact was that for many French and other European and UK retailers, 2023 contract prices were judged to have risen too high, especially now that shipping and input prices were supposedly settling back down post-Covid.
In October this year the French market leader was offering three different ways of buying Cote d’Ivoire bananas (loose, hands of five or band-wrapped in plastic) and charging anything from 79 euro cents (a ‘short term promotion’) to 1.80 per kilo…for the SAME supplier’s same fruit. Enough said?!
2. Human rights and environmental regulations must be reciprocal and transparent at both ends
The much-bandied language of ‘transparency’ also appears to the world’s banana producers to be a non-reciprocal appeal, where the distribution of value and margins at the downstream end of the chain (once fruit is loaded FoB) are anything but transparent.
Ditto for the way the EU is perceived to have developed some aspects of pesticide residue legislation, new organic certification rules.. and, once again, the lack of scrutiny of, say, trade union rights, wages and workplace health and safety in the lead buyer firms’ own operations.
In short, at worst, sheer hypocrisy from the old colonial masters and their modern-day acolytes, at best a kind of beatific ignorance of realities for producers and all the human beings employed at the beginning and all along the lead firms’ supply chains.
3. The plethora of private standards has led us to ‘over-certification’ and this has to stop
Take a glance at the band-wrapped bunches (below) sold in France; then take in the knowledge that a leading producer in Africa – heavily invested in a genuinely impressive large-scale agro-ecological transition on its five banana estates – packs 36 different box and pack types per week (with any number of stickers and labels according to the customer) for UK and other European buyers.
The Latin Americans, led by Ecuador, did a study late last year showing 60 percent overlap – duplication – between the standards required by buyers that oblige producers to comply with between one and four of a dozen different private certification schemes in the crazy banana export/import world.
Enough said? Not quite,
Rainforest Alliance, fingered for over a decade by independent trade unions representing workers in plantations and packhouses across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, now needs to “adapt or die”, as one leading fruit multinational spokesperson delicately put it back in March at the FAO in Rome! African producers are ready to stop using RA certification right now, if their customers were to understand why.
Watch this space.
Who are the main players in consuming countries that need to change ways of working ?
First of all, the big retail buyers cannot go on imagining that their commercial decisions are in a vacuum of their own commercial logics. The two sides of the corporate purchasing and marketing brains need to be wholly integrated into the logics of a transformed and reciprocally fair relationship with the people with whom they do business at the production end, employees and employers alike. This means giving the space and listening, understanding real complexities and judging how fair pricing can work for all, including with the intermediary companies that load, ship, unload, truck, ripen and truck the fruit to their distribution centres.
Secondly, especially in key markets where there has been relatively slow or little movement towards meaningful public engagements and changed practices, such as North America, Russia and France, citizen-consumers need to mobilise – and be mobilised – and advocate for change, along with changed buying practices and real ethical choice.
Thirdly, the critical players – producing companies, trade unions and buyers – need to talk, as far as is possible, without a host of intermediary agencies and a confusing diversity of unjoined-up initiatives competing for buyer attentions.
Harmonising strategies amongst those who control the resources is essential and urgent. Otherwise, like private certifiers, it will be a matter of « adapt or die ».
When it comes to peer-to-peer training and education and capacity-building the themes are clear to producers and to organised workers : social dialogue to support the emergence of more and more national Collective Bargaining frameworks and agreements, to boost women’s empowerment and leadership at all levels, to put safe work into practice for good, and, last but far from least, to co-construct a significant agroecological transformation away from monoculture.
A hefty and urgent agenda, but within our collective reach, no ?