Make Fruit Fair

Between 2015 and 2018, nineteen organisations from across the world came together to campaign to Make Fruit Fair! NGOs from Europe, working in close partnership with small farmer organisations and plantation worker unions from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean campaigned to improve living and working conditions for the hundreds of thousands of people who grow, pick and pack the tropical fruit that we buy in our shops every day.

Most prominent examples are bananas and pineapples: Bananas are the most traded fruit in the world, grown in more than 150 countries, producing 107 million tonnes of fruit per year. The international pineapple trade is expanding rapidly with one in two pineapples now grown for export.

Violations of labour standards and environmental rights are common in both the banana and pineapple production, as in other tropical fruit production, and in many cases this situation is worsening.

While the Campaign formally concluded in 2018, Banana Link and the other campaign partners continue to campaign under the Make Fruit Fair banner to promote ethical and sustainable practices in tropical fruit supply chains.

The Campaign Was About:

• promoting fair and sustainable tropical fruit supply chains
• defending social and environmental rights in producing countries
• providing a space for Southern voices in producing countries to be heard
• linking producing countries to consumer countries by campaigning together
• encouraging new forms of international trade policies and practices

What Did the Campaign “Make Fruit Fair!” Specifically Ask For?

We wanted supermarkets, as the most powerful actors along the supply chain, to pay fair prices to their suppliers that cover the costs of sustainable production.

We wanted fruit companies and supermarkets to guarantee:

• living wages are paid on the plantations they source from
• equal access for women to employment and training
• respect for human rights, including labour rights, such as the freedom to join an independent trade union
• the environment is respected by reducing toxic agrochemical use

We wanted governments to:

• regulate the abuses of supermarket buyer power
• ensure that companies are held accountable for working conditions in producing countries
• support policies that encourage fair and sustainable fruit production

Pesticides, unfair salaries, exploitation: plantation workers in Ecuador and Costa Rica are grafting in order to produce fresh bananas and pineapples for our supermarket shelves. In our pan-European Lidl campaign, more than 75,000 people demand fair wages, health protection and trade union rights for plantation workers – resulting in first achievements: Two Lidl suppliers are starting to change the conditions on their plantations.

On gigantic plantations in Costa Rica and Ecuador, pineapples and bananas are grown for European supermarket chains. Plantation workers are exploited under scandalous conditions: salaries are mostly below the legal minimum wage, excessive overtime work under extreme weather conditions is standard and employment contracts are mainly short-term or concluded with subcontractors. Freedom or organization is not common here: workers who organize themselves are often dismissed sooner or later.

The permanent use of highly toxic and partly carcinogenic pesticides has severe effects: The workers are on the field during pesticide applications or they have to return to the plantations immediately afterwards. Many of them suffer from nausea, dizziness and skin rashes, not to forget the long-term health effects. In several regions of Costa Rica, the groundwater is already contaminated by pesticides, putting the drinking water supply at risk.

A European-wide campaign of the Make Fruit Fair!-network has been advocating for Lidl’s plantation workers: More than 75,000 people request from the supermarket giant Lidl to ensure fair salaries, health protection and respect of trade-union rights on its suppliers’ plantations. With positive impacts: plantation workers already reported some improvements.

Make Fruit Fair! Campaign Shows First Achievements

In Costa Rica, all workers who are working on the plantation Finca Once, Lidl’s most important pineapple supplier, are receiving the minimum wage now and get paid their overtime. Furthermore, they are no longer supposed to go to the field during the pesticide applications. Only a small part of the workers are employed by a subcontractor now, and even the subcontractor is paying minimum wages and providing social insurance for the workers.

But many problems remain unsolved: up to now the local partner, the trade union UNT, does not have any access to the plantation of Lidl’s supplier Finca Once. Recently, UNT members were sent on holiday under compulsion in order to establish an employee body with a strong employer loyalty. And of course, toxic pesticides are still applied and after the pesticide applications, the workers have to return to the field immediately, when the odour of the pesticides continues to be in the air and the leaves of the pineapples are still moist.

Violation of Trade Union Rights Remains Central Problem

As far as Lidl’s banana supplier Matías in Ecuador is concerned, the situation is found to be similar. Since the beginning of the Lidl campaign, there has been some improvements here as well: re-entry periods after pesticide applications are compiled to more strictly, and all workers have finally received free protective clothing – as regulated by law. But there are some persistent problems here as well: the violation of trade union rights continues to be the core problem. Workers’ organization is a basic condition for the rights enforcement concerning adequate salaries, regular employment and occupational safety.

Banana Link, as members of the Europe-wide Make Fruit Fair! Campaign, have published a report evaluating Rainforest Alliance (RA) certification in the light of recent moves by discount supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl to source tropical fruit from RA certified suppliers.

The report – Rainforest Alliance and the Discount Supermarkets: Low Prices and Easy Standards? – looks at the standards and verification systems used by RA and at the realities of daily life on RA certified banana, pineapple and tea plantations, and concludes that RA certification cannot guarantee sustainability at the same low prices which consumers have come to expect from the discount supermarkets.

Whilst recognising that the growth of RA certification over the last fifteen years has been impressive, its rapid expansion has invited a growing suspicion that much of its success can be attributed to the laxity of the certification criteria and the undemanding nature of the certification process. This includes criteria that are difficult to test or are fulfilled easily because they are very much open to interpretation, while the auditing of certified farms is open to compromise, when all the parties involved have a financial or other interest in creating a good impression.

Citing recent independent studies by Oxfam Germany (May 2016), a number of Latin American trade unions and by SOMO (May 2015), the report contends RA standards in respect of recognition of trade union rights and compliance with minimum wage requirements, in particular, are not met on many of the certified banana and pineapple plantations in Latin America or tea plantations in Indonesia and Kenya.

These independent studies also allow for tentative comparisons to be made between RA and other certification standards, which suggest that RA certification performs less well as a stand-alone certification than it does when combined with other certification requirements.

In concluding that RA certification cannot guarantee sustainability at low prices, the report recommends that:

• RA needs to challenge retailers and insist that they pay fair prices which internalise the costs of sustainable production including the costs involved in paying living wages.
• RA should seek to engage with unions in the banana sector by, for example, proactively reaching out to local unions and the Regional Coordination of Banana & Other Agro Industrial Unions (COLSIBA) to offer regional or national opportunities for unions to discuss their concerns so that in future these can be addressed by RA.
• Retailers like Lidl need to acknowledge that sustainable livelihoods will be delivered only when supermarket buyers agree to pay a price which reflects real costs. Lidl needs to pay fair prices and stop squeezing its suppliers.