Banana (23 page)

I don't know for sure whether this diminishment was intentional or just emblematic of a recidivist corporate culture, whose ill doings would be fully revealed in March 2007, when the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the banana company had admitted to dealings with groups Washington officially lists as terrorist organizations. From 1997 through 2004, the Justice Department found, Chiquita paid $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known in that country as the AUC.

The AUC is one of the most violent outlaw groups on the planet. According to
Forbes
magazine, the organization, which controls a private army of 15,000 troops, is involved in “kidnapping, torture, disappearance, rape, murder, beatings, extortion, and drug trafficking.”

In 2001 Chiquita's own lawyers determined that the payments were illegal and warned that they had to be stopped. Management ignored the advice, instead converting the remittances from checks to cash. In April 2007, the company's current CEO, Fernando Aguirre, wrote a three-page article that appeared on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Web site. The document was an odd combination of what appeared to be both genuine anguish—and ignorance. He wrote about the general environment of extortion and murder in Colombia. If Chiquita wanted to protect its Colombian employees, he said, it had to “make protection payments to safeguard our workforce.” When it was discovered that the payments were illegal, he said, it created “a dilemma of more than theoretical proportions for us: The company could stop making the payments, complying with the law but putting the lives of our workers in immediate jeopardy; or we could keep our workers out of harm's way while violating American law.”

For three years, Chiquita chose the latter. Finally, in 2004 the company “found a business solution to our dilemma,” Aguirre wrote: It sold its Colombia assets. (The company continues to buy Colombian bananas from its former division; you can find them in your supermarket.)

WHAT THE BANANA INDUSTRY NEEDS
,
and faces, has changed little since the early days. Chiquita still fights Dole; banana consumption is still increasing worldwide; the fruit is still sliced into cereal. Bananas still need to be grown and transported cheaply in order to be sold cheaply. The biggest obstacle in the equation remains disease. More chemicals are being used to fight Sigatoka, and more workers are getting sick. Over the past several years, five lawsuits were filed against Dole on behalf of banana workers in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama. The suits alleged that the former Standard Fruit had, since the 1970s, knowingly used a pesticide called DBCP—mostly to fight Black Sigatoka—that made workers sterile (the chemical is banned in the United States). In August 2007, Dole CEO David DeLorenzo testified in a Los Angeles courtroom that his company safeguarded the health of workers by instituting screening programs and offering free medical care. Company documents uncovered during the case confirmed that the fruit importer did test employees—and also ignored reports that came back positive. At one point, Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of DBCP, told Dole that the chemical was dangerous and that it would no longer sell it to the banana producers. Dole threatened Dow with a breach-of-contract lawsuit, and the spraying continued. The court case is ongoing.

Many banana workers continue to find themselves in desperate straits, especially in Ecuador, the world's largest producer of Cavendish bananas. In that country, plantation conditions remain primitive, and worker protection laws—including those against child labor—are poorly enforced.

Over the past decade, Ecuador seems to have teetered on the edge of returning to the era of old-style banana republics. In 1999 the country defaulted on its foreign debt and was forced to eliminate its own currency, adopting the U.S. dollar. Ecuador has had eight presidents in the past ten years. But for the moment, the country seems to be pulling itself back into shape. The country's 2006 presidential elections saw a former finance minister, Rafael Correa, go up against the nation's richest private citizen, Álvaro Noboa. If you've looked carefully at the bananas you buy at your local grocery, you may have noticed a sticker identifying some with the Bonita brand name. That banana company is owned by Noboa. In the United States, government officials noted that they were watching the election closely, and that the election of Correa—who promised to close a U.S. military base in Ecuador—would be considered troublesome. Those pronouncements contained echoes of the past, but this time they contributed to Noboa's loss. Almost 60 percent of Ecuadorans cast their votes for Correa. In a nationally broadcast radio address in January 2006, the new president outlined his reformist agenda. What he would do, he said, was “end these mafias that have plundered the country.”

Once again, it was not hard to hear echoes of the past in the pronouncement, and it was not hard to imagine who he was talking about.

W
HAT MAY BE MOST IMPORTANT
about bananas isn't that they've started wars but that they can also help end them. The two banana worlds—ours, where we
want
the fruit, and the other, where people
need
it—are merging in many ways. But with the growth of commercial plantations and the concurrent spread of disease, it is important to remember that, no matter how much we love our bananas, the latter world is much more important, and the choices we make reverberate through both of them.

A crisis hit Africa in the late 1990s. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and millions were left displaced or homeless. The ethnic bloodshed that spread across Rwanda and Burundi captured the world's attention with accounts of bloody ethnic warfare and large-scale massacres, but in the refugee camps that sprung up in Tanzania following the conflict, the issue was more pragmatic: The survivors were hungry.

They needed bananas.

Foreign food aid was arriving—but too slowly and often in the form of products (wheat flour or rice) that were impossible to prepare easily in the vast, primitive camps. Even if those foods could help solve immediate hunger, they could ultimately make the situation worse. “People can't grow those crops in places like that,” Swennen says. Thus, a situation of constant delivery—and ultimate dependence—emerges. “These are banana people, living on banana land,” Swennen explains. “The only way to feed all of them, and to help them get out of the camps, was to give them something not just to eat—but to grow.”

AS REAL, AND SIMPLE
,
as Swennen's solution sounds, making it happen seemed like a remote possibility. Since the arrival of Black Sigatoka in the African lakes region in the 1970s, it had been tearing through crops in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. In the commercial world, Sigatoka can be battled with chemicals. Though treatment must become more aggressive as the leaf-destroying fungus becomes more resistant, our banana supply has remained constant. But most of Africa's bananas are grown in family plots, where spraying is impractical and too expensive. Instead, local villagers find themselves playing a high-stakes game: growing more bananas in an effort to get the yields needed to prevent starvation. The situation was especially bad in the region holding the Tanzanian refugee camps; that area was hard hit by banana maladies. “They were lucky to get 40 percent of plants to actually bear fruit,” says Swennen. “Most never make it—they just fall over.”

As discussed earlier, one of Swennen's first projects when he returned to the lab from Africa in 1993 was to create a banana that resisted Sigatoka. And he had remarkable results, coming up with multiple varieties that successfully avoided the disease. Swennen knew that even if only a small number of people adopted his fruit, it would have a major impact on hunger. Swennen also knew that with bananas so easy to grow, adoption by a few could lead to adoption by millions.

Yet Swennen faced the same problem that he does today: getting permission to test the fruit, even though the bananas he hoped to plant in Tanzania were developed using conventional modification methods (Phil Rowe's embryo rescue combined with the techniques Swennen developed to increase yield). The United States was also pushing for Africa to allow commercially modified products—corn and soy—to be imported to the continent. But the European Union was (as it is now) generally against the use of such foods and implied that African nations that allowed modified crops to be grown might be restricted from importing any agricultural goods across the Mediterranean for fear of cross-crop contamination.

“It wasn't just banana researchers like me caught in the middle,” Swennen says. “It was millions of people.”

Swennen thought his bananas could be an answer for the refugees; he thought they could be an answer for Africa. And he thinks they can be an answer for Panama disease. As the Rwandan crisis continued, Swennen traveled to the refugee camps and border areas. Fighting was still going on in some places; he recalls seeing houses burning and families fleeing in panic. The scientist knew he had to talk to local people, no matter how desperate the situation, to find out what the banana they needed would have to be like. As with the commercial Cavendish, an ideal African banana had requirements: It needed to be familiar enough to grow using existing techniques; It had to taste good and work as an ingredient in staple dishes like
matoke
; and it had to resist the maladies that had already spread, and continued to spread, across the region.

Back in Belgium, Swennen chose two dozen modified varieties, his own and from other labs (including FHIA), picking those he thought would yield fruit that was both resistant to Black Sigatoka and that would fit smoothly into traditional diets. The next step would be to take the chosen varieties back to Africa and test them in the field.

It took two years—two years of hunger, for those waiting in the camps—for officials to finally allow the trials. Finally, in 1997, fifty demonstration fields (the number needed to be high because twenty-one banana varieties were being tested) were set up in Tanzania's Kagera region. The miniature plantations were located on the grounds of churches, rural health facilities, and schools—anyplace where a community could work together to see the plants through the testing process.

The trial did get one unexpected boost: The bananas were good enough that local farmers began to secretly enter the plantations at night. They'd grab what fruit they could and plant it on their family farms—a process that greatly accelerated overall acceptance of Swennen's modified bananas.

Eventually, the farmers participating in the test chose fourteen acceptable fruits for wider distribution. “It was important,” Swennen says, “that they picked what they wanted to grow.” Swennen and his colleagues went back to the lab again and created seventy thousand plantlets in test tubes; these were moved to a series of Tanzanian demonstration fields, where they multiplied, and multiplied again. At each step, local farmers and families were brought in to test the fruit, to see if it would fit into traditional recipes and farming methods. The visitors weren't just impressed with how the fruit resisted Sigatoka. They were also astonished at the mammoth bunches the Belgian bananas produced. The bunches weighed 165 pounds, on average—five times more than was typical for equivalent village fruit. Finally, a well-intentioned outside organization was making food the way the people it was trying to help made food.

In 2000, the pool was reduced to just the few most desirable varieties. Swennen then offered to give the bananas to local farmers, under one condition: that they distribute the plants to their neighbors. Over the next three years, Swennen's bananas grew; they remained Sigatoka-free and helped restore agriculture across war-torn regions. The project was officially declared a success in 2003—it would no longer need to be monitored scientifically. “When we left,” Swennen said, “2.5 million of our plants were growing.”

In the end, Swennen estimates, 500,000 people benefited from the plants. That's about ten times more than a similar effort using nonresistant fruit might yield, but it still was just 2 percent of the region's banana crop. What Swennen hopes is that his bananas will spread, just as the first bananas did in Africa, more than a thousand years ago, and become an integral, and strong, part of the regional diet.

A success story? For the moment. But the future isn't as clear. Swennen's bananas remain susceptible to other banana maladies and pests. Though stronger bananas will likely be created, problems remain: So far none of today's lab-bred bananas are anywhere near perfect, even for the most desperate situations. Some of Swennen's bananas have proved to be highly susceptible to worm-like nematodes. Others yield less fruit than the typical healthy banana plant; still others lack the properties a commercial banana would require.

But the African project was more than a good start: It was the first step in a journey—one that will almost certainly include the use of the most modern techniques available, including full-scale genetic transformation—that is looking more and more essential.

AT HOME, WE HAVE THE CAVENDISH
and only the Cavendish. But choices exist, even within the narrow sphere of our single banana. It isn't hard to see that America's fruit and vegetable aisles have undergone great changes in the past decade. Exotic fruit like kiwis, or even Thai rambutan, have begun to appear regularly. Even ordinary fruit, like apples, now comes from overseas. But the biggest addition is organics: Supermarkets are adding entire sections filled with pesticide-free apples, pears, carrots—and especially bananas.

Shoppers love organic bananas. Unlike similarly grown apples, the natural version of the world's favorite fruit is never scrawny or blemished: They're indistinguishable from their conventionally grown counterparts. They meet the standard bananas have had to meet for over a century.

Organic bananas are a feel-good product. They provide a substantial benefit to workers and the environment, and they're not that much more expensive than ordinary fruit. You've probably seen them in your local market, most likely grown in Ecuador, most likely under the Dole brand name. If you look carefully at the sticker on your banana, you'll see a numeric code printed right beneath the country of origin. On a conventionally grown fruit, the number is 4001. A supermarket cashier punches the digits in as she weighs your selection at the checkout counter, automatically matching price to weight to product. The numbers are part of the price look-up, or PLU, system administered by the International Federation for Produce Standards, and appear on nearly every item in your supermarket's greengrocer section. There are over five hundred codes for different kinds of apples. Cavendish bananas have just two basic identifiers: the 4001 mentioned above and 4186, for a miniature fruit. The codes can be further defined by adding a number at the beginning. Anything that starts with a nine is organic. The coding system is ready for genetically modified bananas: If they ever arrived at market, the identifier, as with other tranformed produce, would begin with an eight.

The problem with organic bananas is that they're hard to grow in quantity. In order to prevent them from succumbing to diseases—especially Black Sigatoka—the fruit needs to be grown in specially quarantined farms, usually located at higher elevations than traditional plantations. The cost is lower yields.

As beneficial as they are to the environment and especially to workers, who don't have to handle toxic chemicals, the truth is that organic bananas probably can't function as an answer to the banana world's most pressing problem: survival. Organic bananas are difficult to grow in the lowlands, where the huge plantations are. Even if organics could thrive in those areas, they'd have to be planted in clean soil, away from areas infected with Black Sigatoka or other banana diseases. That's hard to do without clearing additional forest, as banana companies have done for decades. Just as with fresh plantations during the Gros Michel area, they'd eventually get sick anyway. In a world of vulnerable fruit, an organic banana, by definition, is especially weak.

Organics also do little to increase wages or, beyond the very important issue of pesticide exposure, improve the day-to-day lives of workers. The banana that attempts to do that is called a “fair-trade” banana. If you buy coffee beans at Starbucks, you've likely seen the “fair-trade certified” label. Growers and importers of fair-trade goods agree to have those goods vetted by an independent organization. A fair-trade banana would be one that provides growers and laborers decent compensation, in safe working conditions, and that fosters movement toward independent farming communities. (A fair-trade banana would not necessarily be organic). In Ecuador, such bananas bring about eight dollars per box to the cooperatives that produce them, compared to a dollar or so for standard bananas. For fair trade to work, the movement needs to become much larger. Right now, far less than 1 percent of all Cavendish bananas are fair-trade certified; they work as proof of concept but little more. To make a difference, the big banana companies will need to embrace the idea. They'll need to forgo some profits. Ecuador is a good place to test this. A reform-minded president has, as his symbolic and literal adversary, a banana magnate. If fair trade can take hold there, it can work throughout the world's commercial banana operations.

Will it? That's hard to say. The reason Ecuador has become the largest grower of Cavendish bananas is because it is so cheap to operate there. Fair trade might prompt the big banana companies to move to even cheaper territory, though the spread of Panama disease in Asia may not give them much room to maneuver.

The only genuine way to make fair trade succeed is not to attempt to transform Chiquita or Dole or Ecuador or Honduras or even individual plantations themselves. The shift needs to begin not where bananas are produced, but where they're bought.

Consumers need to insist on fair trade, and governments need to mandate it. Only then will banana growers attempt the changes in infrastructure needed to make either fair trade or organics, or both, a possibility. Such a thing has happened in some parts of the world: Almost half the bananas bought in Switzerland are fair-trade products. Worldwide, the amount of organic and fair-trade fruit produced has more than doubled in the past five years. Though the target remains statistically distant, the process is the best hope for bringing a measure of justice to workers who, for over a century, have known very little.