Bananas

The best of the bunch?

Bananas are the most popular fruit in the UK. We eat about one in every six bananas consumed in the EU. For years, though, the banana has been at the centre of conflicts over the rights of workers and damage to the environment.

Many of the bananas eaten in the UK come from Latin America, principally Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador.

While some bananas are grown by small independent producers, most come from large plantations controlled by big multinational corporations. These companies often own entire supply chains, from the farms to the distribution and shipping businesses.

Sadly, human rights abuses are common. In many countries, corporations focused on exporting the product abroad offer poor working conditions, often to vulnerable migrants. They rely on toxic chemicals that pollute the local environment and harm the health of local communities.

In response to this, bananas were one of the first products to be certified under Fairtrade, meaning that more ethical alternatives are available.

Exploitation of workers

Over recent decades, trade unions, civil society organisations and campaigners have reported serious abuses of workers’ rights in the banana industry. In many of the Latin American countries where the bananas we eat often come from, workers have struggled to claim their rights as unions remain repressed.

Facing in-work poverty

In 2018, an Oxfam report on conditions for banana workers in Ecuador – the biggest exporter of the fruit – found that most workers were living “a hand-to-mouth existence.”

Although the legal minimum wage is largely respected on banana plantations, it is often too low to cover the basic costs of living. Some two-thirds of workers in Costa Rica, Peru and Ecuador said that they do not earn enough to cover basic needs, when interviewed in 2019 for Oxfam. In Ecuador, banana workers earn almost 20% less than the living wage or income. In Côte d’Ivoire, the gap for many field and packhouse workers is much larger.

Overtime is frequently not paid. The cost of work tools, clothes and ‘other’ deductions are made from salaries.

Extremely long hours and unsafe conditions are also often enforced. Almost all work is done by hand, leaving many field workers and those in packaging plants with repetitive strain injuries.

“The hours we are expected to work to earn the minimum wage go well beyond the legal limit of 48 per week, but if you complain or join the union you are likely to be sacked”, one woman working for a large Costa Rican company told Banana Link.

Unable to claim workers’ rights

Often, workers are left unable to demand better conditions because they are employed on short-term contracts and risk being laid off for speaking out. Others are employed through subcontractors, allowing companies to abdicate responsibility. In 2019, trade unions in Costa Rica condemned Chiquita for laying off 178 workers at one of its plantations and outsourcing the work to three companies instead.

The problems are exacerbated in places like Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, where many are desperately poor migrants. If current workers protest, companies know that they can replace them with others in serious need of employment who will accept their conditions. In the Dominican Republic, as much as 75% of banana workers are from Haiti, who often feel unable to join unions “due to fear of discrimination, repression and deportation (if undocumented)”, according to the UN.

However, there is growing recognition that these problems need to be addressed. Many of the major companies have come together in the World Banana Forum, a coalition of companies, governments, trade unions, civil society organisations and others, which is beginning to address some of the problems.

Female workers in the banana industry face harassment, precarious employment and unequal wages.

In January, seven German supermarkets including Aldi and Lidl signed a voluntary agreement committing to the payment of living wages in their agricultural supply chains. The commitment will see them working with suppliers towards a long-term plan, including with their banana producers.

Women in the banana industry

For women, the situations they face are often even worse than those of male workers. Many employers see women as a ‘high risk high cost’ option, leaving female workers in constant danger of losing their employment, and meaning that in Latin America they make up as little as 7% of the workforce.

Women usually work in the packaging department, where they can be paid less than male fieldworkers. In 2016, a Lidl supplier in Ecuador reportedly cut wages for all female workers so that they were just a third of those of the male workers.

They face harassment, sexual discrimination and some receive no maternity benefits. In many Latin American countries, female employees have to provide medical certificates proving that they are not pregnant or submit to pregnancy tests before they are offered jobs. Reports of this have also come from the same Lidl supplier as mentioned above.

The case of Ecuador

In Ecuador, an organisation has to have over 30 members from a single farm to be recognised as a union. It was only in 2019 that the government finally allowed a national banana workers’ federation to be legally registered and receive the protections and rights of a formal union.

In 2016 and 2017, Oxfam investigations found that none of the workers they spoke to on Ecuador’s banana farms had been allowed to establish unions. ‘Black lists’ with the names of any union members are said to pass between plantation owners, ensuring they will not be employed.

Mass lay-offs of unionised workers can take place without the company breaking the law, because workers are often employed on short-term contracts, meaning that the company simply chooses not to ‘renew’ their employment.

At the Lidl supplier in Ecuador, by the end of 2017, at least 10 union members had been let go.

Threats to union members

Anti-union actions are common, including cases of violence against trade unionists. Union members and leaders representing the workers have received threats against themselves and their families, ongoing surveillance and break-ins. Several leaders have been murdered, in Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala amongst other places since 2016.

Increasingly, companies create ‘yellow unions’, which they control, choosing their own leaders and heavily encouraging workers to join the organisation. Reybanpac, owner of the Favorita brand, was accused of deducting membership fees from the wages of 4,000 workers for an association established by the company and with only 70 members.

Their Rainforest Alliance certification was suspended for a year until they held free and fair elections to the association in each plantation. Find out more about banana certification schemes.

Union suppression

Over the past 10 years, many companies have moved their operations to areas where unions are most suppressed. In Guatemala, Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte have all moved purchasing away from the unionised North of the country to the much cheaper non-union Pacific South.

Nowadays, Del Monte buys at least five times as much from the non-union South as it produces in its own unionised farms in the North of the country.

The vast majority of these bananas will be sold on US markets. In the UK, “the pressure for ethical sourcing” has ensured that the majority are imported from other countries like Colombia where most plantations are at least covered by a collective bargaining agreement, according to Alistair Smith from BananaLink.

Nonetheless, the same companies supply both markets. Alistair Smith says,

“Chiquita and Dole continue to put a lot of pressure on their collective bargaining agreements with trade unions, trying to keep wage increases to an absolute minimum and cut other social benefits... Only Del Monte [of the big banana conglomerates] has been relatively open to negotiation recently.”

Certification Schemes

Bananas were one of the first products to become certified under the Fairtrade label over 20 years ago. Its involvement in the banana industry has been credited with helping to support many small producers. To find out more about Fairtrade and other certification schemes, have a read of our feature. Here, you will also be able to see how the supermarkets' bananas are certified.

Tax avoidance

We rated all the companies on their likely use of tax avoidance strategies.

Those that received our middle rating lost half a mark, and those that received our worst lost a whole.

Best: AgroFair (Fair Tax Mark certified), Booths, Comercializadora Internacional Banacol De Colombia SA, Co-op Group (Fair Tax Mark certified), Iceland Topco, John Lewis Partnership, Marks & Spencer Group, Wm Morrison Supermarkets, Stiepmann Stifung/Carolus-Stifung, William Jackson Food Group

Middle: Ocado.

Worst: Asda, Dole, Favorita, Fresh Del Monte, J Sainsbury, Schwarz Beteiligungs-KG, Sucocítrico Cutrale/ Sufra Group, Sumitomo, Tesco.