“Why was he so sad,“ you might ask.

Well maybe, it’s because although many people appreciated him for his golden yellow color and his sweet, yummy flavor, they never took the time to get to know him. Really get to know him, that is. Don’t get me wrong; he was flattered when people walked down the aisles of the supermarket and they remarked on his looks, made comments about his flavor, and how good he would taste in their morning cereal. It’s not that he didn’t like hearing these compliments and all. But, he couldn’t help thinking that the chatter was, well, you know, kind of superficial. I mean there was A LOT more to the banana than just what met the eye.

So even though a lot of attention was focused on the banana, he was actually quite lonely. Rarely did anyone stop and try to get to know him. Really, get to know him that is. Like where did he come from anyway? How was he raised and by whom? What was it like on the farm where he grew up? Was it a huge plantation with acres of banana plants or a small, shaded plot with lots of diversity? Nobody stopped to ask him what the conditions were like on his farm.  Was there running water? Electricity? Did they use chemicals to make him grow bigger or was he raised naturally?

There was so much more to know about the banana besides his size, shape, and color. I mean, how did he end up in the grocery store so many thousands of miles away from home? Who brought him there and why? And what was in it for the people who sent him up north? “They just don’t care,“ he thought despondently. “No one understands me. Why don’t they try? Get to know the real banana?” There was no doubt about it: the banana was becoming downright depressed.

But one day, in a food co-operative in the mid-west, something happened.

It started off kind of slowly, but soon there could be no denying it. Something was changing. Consumers began asking questions. They woke up. Really woke up. One day, some shoppers began asking about the people that lived on his farm; who were they and what were their lives like? Increasingly curious, they actually started to ask the NAMES of the farmers!

Once the people learned the farmers’ names… well, then they wanted to know even more. Like who were these folks who had transported him to the grocery store? Were they nice people? Were they interested in him and in the welfare of the farmers back home? Did they pay those farmers a fair price and treat them with respect?

Oh, there was so much to the banana’s story.

The banana was used to getting lots of attention; he was after all, the most popular fruit in the store. But now, things were changing. People started to see his many facets. It was no longer just about his skin color and his attractive shape. They saw that he had depth. I mean, he was sort of a complex dude when you got right down to it.

The word spread and before long, a new movement began taking shape. Forward thinking shoppers realized that not all bananas were alike. Each banana had a unique story. And then they realized that it wasn’t even that the story of one individual banana was so important. No, to really understand the banana, you had to analyze the social-political-economic system in which he or she was raised. Those things actually made a huge difference, you see.

In fact, the more the consumers learned about the banana and the farmers who raised him, the more they saw how they themselves played a role in the banana’s story. If not all bananas were treated equally (or fairly for that matter), then the consumer could influence the story simply by asking the right questions. Armed with information, choices could be made. Amazing how beautifully simple it could be. Consumers had power; they could affect change. They just had to care. And, then take action. Stand up for what was right.

The story of this banana is now almost over. (Although no one can say how the bigger story ends.)

The consumers kept asking questions and they grew more and more knowledgeable. But then, as sometimes happens: the more they learned, the more upset they became. There was no going back to the days when they walked the supermarket aisles and could blindly ignore the truth. They got angry. They hadn’t realized, or fully understood, or maybe just hadn’t wanted to see. The companies that had been raising all the bananas; picking them, packing them in boxes, and sending them in refrigerated containers across the ocean to stores in the North; had such a tight, powerful control over every aspect in the banana’s world. His farm, the farmers, the shipping lines, the distribution centers, even the price the banana sold for in the store; all that was controlled by five large companies.

So when the consumers realized this, they grew very angry. They were outraged about the tremendous exploitation that had been going on for decades in the bananas’ homelands and on their farms. In fact, it had been happening all this time, right under their noses. But worse yet, it seemed like there was nothing that they could do about it. I mean, if you liked bananas, what choice did you have? Even in the most progressive food co-ops, there was generally only one brand of banana available.

And here’s where today’s story comes to an end.

One day, consumers began to have a choice!

A newly branded banana appeared on the scene. It came exclusively from small farmers who were organized in a co-operative where they had decision-making power over how their business was run and how the land was stewarded. No pesticides were used to grow these bananas. And this new company (well, it was actually a co-operative as well) who sent the bananas to the stores up North took such good care of them, and paid the farmers so fairly; they even respected the consumers so much that they provided them with information about the bananas and the farmers.

And so it was that the bananas, the farmers, and those who eventually enjoyed their sweetness, were all healthier and happier.  And really, ever since then, the banana’s mood changed dramatically. I suppose you could say that they all lived happily ever after.

Click here to learn more about Equal Exchange bananas and our farmer partners.  Click here to learn more about the Principle Six Co-operative Trade Movement.

Credits:

(In order of appearance)

Sad banana:  Lukas Mills, Designer (and aspiring Fruit Model), Spunk Design Machine

Food co-operative in the midwest:  Linda Cowden, Produce Manager, The Merc Co-op, Lawrence, Kansas

Another co-operative:  Jean Mackenzie, Weaver’s Way, Philadelphia, PA and Jessica Jones-Hughes, Oke USA

Banana display:  Keweenaw Co-op, Hancock, Michigan

Equal Exchange Bananas:  Valley Natural Foods, Burnsville, Minnesota

In the warehouse:  The Oke USA/Equal Exchange Banana Team; Nicole Vitello, Bradley Russell, Jessica Jones-Hughes

Happy Bananas:  Lukas Mills, Spunk Design Machine

Equal Exchange would also like to thank all of the pioneering food co-operatives, natural food stores, and consumers who are helping us to transform the banana industry.  Adelante!

… José Gregorio Mangones Lugo, alias “Carlos Tijeras,” who commanded the William Rivas Front of the AUC’s Northern Block, has provided a sworn statement which sheds new light on the nature of Dole’s relationship to the AUC paramilitaries. The William Rivas Front operated in the banana zone and surrounding areas in the Colombian province of Magdalena, until it demobilized in 2006. Mangones is currently in jail in Barranquilla, Colombia. Both Dole and Chiquita have for many years exported bananas from this area. To read an English translation of the affidavit, click here.

In the affidavit, Mangones, who has already confessed to hundreds of murders as part of the “Justice and Peace” process in Colombia, asserts not only that both Dole and Chiquita regularly paid money to the AUC, but that they did so in return for certain “services,” including the murder of unionized banana workers and others who it was suspected could potentially interfere with the two companies’ profitable operations. Though Chiquita confessed to criminal charges that it violated U.S. anti-terrorism laws, the company has claimed that it was a victim of extortion. Dole, for its part, has denied ever making payments to the AUC.

The new revelations by Mangones will make it more difficult for Dole to deny the truth, and for Chiquita to continue portraying itself as a victim. International Rights Advocates and the Conrad & Scherer law firm have filed civil lawsuits against both Dole and Chiquita, representing the heirs of approximately 2,000 victims of the AUC in Magdalena and adjacent provinces. The lawsuits can be viewed at  (Dole) and (Chiquita).

Given that the Magdalena banana zone was the William Rivas Front’s primary area of operation, one of the Front’s “main functions … was to provide security for the banana plantations,” according to Mangones. “The income that the William Rivas Front received from Chiquita and Dole was essential to our operation. In a normal month, 80% to 90% of the income for the William Rivas Front came from the banana companies.”  ”The AUC even had an open public relationship with the heads of the plantations, whether it be Dole or Chiquita. The AUC moved like fish in water in the banana plantations, because we liberated the banana zone in northern Magdalena [from the FARC guerrillas] and had military control of the territory.” As part of its provision of security to the banana companies, the AUC “guarded the plantations and trucks that carried fruit to the port so that they were not attacked by the guerillas, looted, or robbed by common delinquents, protected their managers, assets, and employees and we made sure that the workers and unions collaborated with the company and would not demand unjust or exaggerated labor claims or be manipulated to carry out banana strikes.”

Not all employees were protected, though: “My men were contacted on a regular basis by Chiquita or Dole administrators to respond to a criminal act or address some other problems. We would also get calls from the Chiquita and Dole plantations identifying specific people as ‘security problems’ or just ‘problems.’ Everyone knew that this meant we were to execute the identified person. In most cases those executed were union leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation, and the Dole or Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals were suspected guerillas or criminals.”

Mangones has provided especially chilling details of Dole’s responsibility for murders in Magdalena: he lists the names of 16 of his victims whom, he states, the AUC murdered because Dole “managers, administrators, supervisors or plantation heads” fingered them as guerrilla “collaborators” or “militiamen.” These 16 are just “a few of the most representative” among “countless examples.” Among the victims were Dole employees, some of them members of SINTRAINAGRO, the banana and agricultural workers’ union. Some other victims listed were members of a peasant association that had invaded land that Dole wanted for banana production. After listing the names of the victims and the places/dates of their extra-judicial executions, Mangones adds, “As I stated earlier, most of the work of the William Rivas Front in the Zona Bananera was on behalf of Chiquita or Dole. Likewise, a large number of the executions we performed can be linked directly to either Dole or Chiquita or both companies.”

Another crucial “service” involved “pacifying” the Magdalena section of the SINTRAINAGRO trade union. In the Urabá region of Antioquia province, Colombia’s larger banana zone, by the mid 1990s SINTRAINAGRO’s came to be firmly controlled by former EPL guerrillas who demobilized in 1991, and then entered into a strategic alliance with banana growers and the paramilitaries against the Left. But the leadership of the Magdalena section of SINTRAINAGRO remained more politically diverse until the AUC violently imposed its control in 2001.

According to Mangones, “We also helped Chiquita and Dole by pacifying the labor union that represented banana workers in the [Magdalena] region. When I became Commander of the William Rivas Front, the union that represented banana workers was SINTRAINAGRO. This was an aggressive, leftist union. I believe they were sympathetic to the FARC. I directed the execution of SINTRAINAGRO’s leftist President, Jose Guette Montero. On January 24, 2001, in Cienaga, near the Olympic supermarket, between 17^th Street and 18^th Street, we shot Jose Guette Montero and killed him. I then installed Robinson Olivero as President of the union, and to this day, the leaders of SINTRAINAGRO are people the AUC has approved. Once we put our people in charge of SINTRAINAGRO, the union paid me 10% of the union dues it collected on a monthly basis. This union represented workers for both the Dole and Chiquita plantations.”

For more information about these lawsuits, contact International Rights Advocates.

The Banana Land Campaign

In Coordination with: International Rights Advocates, La Isla Foundation, The Affected Film Series,  and Law Offices of Conrad and Scherer:

“My men were contacted on a regular basis by Chiquita or Dole administrators to respond to a criminal act or address some other problems. We would also get calls from the Chiquita and Dole plantations identifying specific people as “security problems” or just “problems.” Everyone knew that this meant we were to execute the identified person. In most cases, those executed were union leaders or members or individuals seeking to hold or reclaim land that Dole or Chiquita wanted for banana cultivation, and the Dole or Chiquita administrators would report to the AUC that these individuals were suspected guerillas or criminals.” –Carlos Tijeras, 2009

For Immediate Release: (New York City, NY)

December 6th, 2009 will mark the launch of the Banana Land Campaign at the Harlem School of The Arts on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 6:30 pm. This event will provide new details regarding payments made to a Colombian terrorist organization by Chiquita and Dole. Speakers will include leaders from the Colombian community in NYC, filmmaker Jason Glaser, lawyer Terry Collingsworth and special guest Dan Koeppel, author of the book Banana.

The world’s largest producers of bananas, Chiquita (formerly United Fruit Company) and Dole, are in US courts defending themselves against allegations of payments made to AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) paramilitaries who murdered, displaced and maimed their workers in the interest of global business. The AUC was officially designated a terrorist organization by the US State Department in 2001.

Copies of a breakthrough declaration by former AUC Commander Carlos Tijeras will be available at the event. This affidavit provides definitive proof that Chiquita and Dole used the AUC, a designated terrorist organization, as a mercenary force that murdered thousands of innocent people in and around the banana plantations.

We are launching the Banana Land Campaign to build a bridge between the consumer and the Colombian communities affected by this continuing tragedy. By linking mothers with mothers and workers with workers the campaign will provide concrete information that will educate banana consumers in both their hearts and minds, inspiring them to make sure that justice is served in both US and Colombian courts and that meaningful reparations are made.

Watch the movie trailer here:

Where:

The Harlem School of the Arts is located in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem at:

645 Saint Nicholas Avenue at W. 141st

Street, NYC 10037    MAP

When:

December 6th, 2009 from 6:30pm-9:30pm

6:30-7:30 • Meet and greet w/ free cocktails and Colombian food.  Music provided by DJ Sambarella.

7:30-8:30 • Kick off of the campaign, presentations by Daniel Koeppel, Terry Collingsworth, Jason Glaser, a spokesman from the NYC Colombian Community and a reading of the evidence we have garnered that refutes both Dole’s and Chiquita’s claims regarding their payments to the AUC.

8:30-9:30 • Question and Answer and a chance for networking for all interested parties w/ beats and rhythms supplied by DJ Sambarella

For more information, a full press-packet, a trailer for the feature documentary, The Affected: Banana Land, please click here or contact Jason Glaser at laislafoundation@gmail.com.

El Dragón, our friend over at Fair Food Fight has written a great piece with a lot of interesting comments on the subject so I think I will just take the liberty to share his post with all of you here. Do check out Fair Food Fight for more information and commentary on today’s food industry because what’s going on in front of us and behind our backs is affecting every last one of us and in no uncertain terms.

Tue, 06/16/2009

A new foodumentary, Bananas! (trailer), has Dole Food Co.’s full attention. From the LA Times:

In the eyes of Dole Food Co., [Fredrik] Gertten’s film [Banana's] is an egregiously flawed document based on what Dole lawyer Scott Edelman calls “a phony story” that has been discredited by the allegedly fraudulent conduct of the L.A. attorney, Juan J. Dominguez, at the film’s center. Dole, the world’s largest producer of fruits and vegetables, is vowing to sue both the filmmaker and the Los Angeles Film Festival for defamation if it screens the movie this week.

Them’s fightin’ words, and one can see Dole’s point of view. After all, Dominguez managed to score a number of court victories against Dole, only to have two of those rulings overturned when it came to light that Dominguez had concocted evidence and testimony.

In a 2007 jury trial before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria G. Chaney, Dole lost and was ordered to pay $1.58 million to four of the dozen Nicaraguans claiming injury in that case, several of whom are depicted in Gertten’s film. Dole is appealing that case.

Then this spring, in a dramatic reversal of events, Chaney threw out two other lawsuits against Dole after being presented by Dole investigators with evidence gathered from Nicaraguans who said that they had been recruited and coached by lawyers, outfitted with false work histories and falsified medical lab reports, and promised payouts to pose as pesticide victims.

In her April 23, 2009 ruling on the case, Chaney said that “the actions of the attorneys in Nicaragua and some of the attorneys in the United States, specifically the Law Offices of Juan Dominguez, have perverted the court’s ability to deliver justice to those parties that come before it.”

“What has occurred here is not just a fraud on this court, but it is blatant extortion of the defendants,” i.e. Dole, the judge said in her ruling. The “plaintiffs’ fraud,” the judge said, “permeates every aspect of this case.”

Goal scored for Goliath.

But while that disclosure taints one lawyer’s legal arguments (and the principle character of Bananas!), it doesn’t undo the reality of the sad situation that Dole and other fruit companies created — or the larger truth of this film. Namely, it doesn’t undo the fact that Dole acknowledges that it used a devastating pesticide (called DBCP and known by friends as “nemagon”) in banana planations in Nicaragua, the Philippines, Honduras, the Ivory Coast, Costa Rica, and other banana-growing countries, and that that pesticide in all likelihood caused sterility in thousands of male banana plantation workers, miscarriages in women, and other serious health effects back into the mid-seventies. Nemagon is an organophosphate and a hormone disruptor and was banned in the United States in 1979, though its use continued in banana-producing countries well into the nineties. It also does not undo the fact that Dow Chemical, the producer of DBCP, said it wouldn’t sell the pesticide to Dole anymore because the chemical was too dangerous, or the fact that Dole threatened Dow Chemical with a breach-of-contract lawsuit if it didn’t keep selling the chemical to the fruit company (from the book Banana by Dan Koeppel). It also ignores the fact that Dole has settled quite a few of these farm worker cases out of court.

Dole is trying to control and create truth by threatening filmmaker Gertten with legal action (and frankly, given the years of bad press generated by these lawsuits, I don’t think it’s a mere threat). Dominguez was just one lawyer, representing some workers in one country. The fact is, there are thousands of farm workers in each of the countries mentioned above who’ve stepped forward to file allegations against Dole. If the company succeeds in shutting down this documentary and preventing it from circulating in film festivals and theaters, the experience of all those farm workers, a generation of them across the planet, and the indignities they suffered for the sake of a fruit company, will also be prevented from being witnessed in America.

(On a side note, the revelations about Dominguez also fail to answer other disturbing allegations against Dole. Please read up on Fair Food Fight’s Screw the Tallyman initiative, and call for an investigation into Dole for allegedly funding Colombian paramilitary groups and driving small banana farmers from their land.)

Even while our struggling economy leads more shoppers to Wal-Mart, to ship more of their money to China and oil-producing theocracies, examples like Fair Trade coffee inspire me to believe that Americans are capable of doing the right thing, willing to sacrifice something, to truly invest in our values. But Fair Trade is also an example of how disconnected we truly are.

European consumers purchase Fair Trade-certified rice, quinoa, vanilla, flowers and bananas daily at their local supermarkets. Bananas, which have yet to make a dent in the American consumers’ radar, are a perfect example; the political and often violent history of banana production is astoundingly depraved. Bananas represent the world’s most popular and most–traded agricultural commodity after coffee. In April of 2008, the third-largest supermarket chain in Europe, Sainbury’s, committed to sourcing Fair Trade bananas exclusively. Tesco, the fifth-largest retailer in the world, has seen a 60% growth in Fair Trade produce since 2005, including bananas. While the United States seems content with a dismissable percentage of our coffee being Fair Trade, our contemporaries are pushing the boundaries of Fair Trade across the market.

Bananas are grown in over 100 countries in the world. Indigenous to Papua New Guinea, they have grown to become an economic powerhouse in tropical countries around the world. The largest fruit commodity in the world, “dessert bananas”, as we know them in the United States, represent a tiny (15-20%) of global production. In developing nations, bananas and their starchier relatives, plantains, are a dietary staple in the developing world, providing much-need sustenance for millions of the world’s poorest inhabitants. Millions of families rely on bananas to feed their families and fund their own community development.

Our own adoration of bananas began in earnest in the early 20^th century, centuries after Portuguese traders introduced their production to their Atlantic colonies and later Brazil, and the Spanish emulated their cultivation in Central America in the 1500′s. Companies like the United Fruit Company established their domination in post-colonial Central America in the late 1800′s, and converted millions of acres of farmland to banana cultivation for export to the United States and Europe. Building upon the success of coffee and sugar in the developing world, United Fruit and their contemporaries, established gargantuan plantations in Honduras, Guatemala and across southern North America. They invested heavily in the infrastructure to produce and export the crop; resulting in entire countries built and completely reliant upon the banana trade.

Millions of small farmers were pushed off their land, enslaved by emerging “transnational corporations”. Formerly vibrant, diverse agricultural economies, reeling from the effects of Spanish colonialism, were converted to environmental and humanitarian hellscapes. Indigenous farmers were forced into slavery and their lands transformed into agricultural assembly-lines, while American business interests touted their “investment” in developing nations. Their investment, in actuality, was self-serving: railroads from plantations to ports, banks to finance banana cultivation and railroads, and export houses to facilitate the transport of wealth from fledgling economies to New York City.

By 1901, United Fruit was so entrenched in Latin America economics and society that the Guatemalan government commissioned the company to manage the countries postal service, and by 1930 UF was the largest employer in Central America. Their economic and political clout resulted in what we now refer to as “Banana Republics”; countries so subservient to American fruit companies they were no longer considered nations as much as Chiquita plantations.

The influence of United Fruit extended far beyond the politics of Central America. The American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, represented the United Fruit Company in court, and his brother, Allen Dulles (head of the CIA) led the 1954 invasion of Guatemala and subsequent assassination of the democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz, with the support of the American Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs John Moors Cabot, the former President of United Fruit. The egregious violation of sovereignty and human rights barely registered on the conscience of the American consumer; and when it did, United Fruit changed its name to Chiquita and continued its assent to global fruit empire.

Bananas, more than any other commodity, have come to represent colonialism and humanitarian indifference; the suffering of millions for the benefit of a few. Countries, communities and families have been destroyed for the sake of cheap produce. A previously unknown crop, bananas transformed the livelihood and culture of continents, and snuffed the hope of the developing world.

While Americans continue to worry about their own pocket-books, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our Auto companies, we fail to realize that our actions are fomenting unrest and hatred around the world. Fair Trade is not just the right thing to do, it is a matter of national security and prosperity; we cannot defeat our enemies abroad if our actions continue to create dissidents and anti-American extremists and we can’t climb our way out of this recession if we are unwilling to invest in local economies or cut ourselves off from cheap oil and cheap stuff made in sweatshops in Southeast Asia. Our assent to global hegemony was based on a commitment to justice, equality and freedom; our decline is epitomized by our commitment to the opposite.

At Equal Exchange we feel strongly that small-scale sustainable farming is the most effective way to feed the planet, care for the environment, and sustain healthy and vibrant communities and businesses. We believe that small farmer co-operatives provide a model for participatory decision-making, local control, and economic development that is desperately needed to fix a broken food system and an ailing planet.

In this blog, we have tried to make our case by highlighting inspiring stories from our farmer co-op partners and referencing articles written about the importance of agroecology, organic farming, and consumer and farmer movements that are trying to make changes to agricultural and trade policies that serve no one but large scale agribusiness. We have deliberately tried not to focus too much on the debate around plantations, or the competition between different coffee roasters. Nevertheless, I wanted to share Nick’s observations as I thought he did a great job of highlighting some of the history of plantations and the reasons why we choose to focus our work, and continue to build strong relationships, with small farmer organizations in the Fair Trade system.

Fair Trade as a Tool For Transformation: Can plantations play that role?

by Nicholas Reid

For years now, folks have been questioning whether the Fair Trade certifiers should have allowed plantations into a system which was founded by and for small farmer co-operatives. One of the arguments put forth to justify the entry of plantations into the system is that there are many products (such as bananas and tea) which are primarily produced by plantations and therefore are not possible to source from small farmer co-operatives. This is a false premise. The majority of bananas and tea ARE produced by small farmers. More importantly, by allowing plantations into the Fair Trade system, the certifiers are ensuring that products produced by small farmer co-operatives will never thrive in the Fair Trade system.

I would buy the argument that the majority of the world’s tea, bananas and cocoa for export are grown by plantations and large-scale agriculture. But seriously, Fair Trade exists to support small farmers because plantations dominate banana and tea production for export. It aims to create the systems that would allow small farmers to benefit from exporting those products.

Allowing plantations into the Fair Trade system is a complete departure from the principles upon which Fair Trade was created. More importantly, it is also a betrayal of the farmers who built the system and a continuation of the marginalization of small farmers in the most impoverished countries in the world. Fair Trade was created to support organized small-scale producers and connect them to export markets. It was a response to the failure of plantation economies, and development policies designed around centralized ownership and production, to affect transformative change or economic growth that empowers and benefits people. Plantation-based Fair Trade is a slightly less gruesome extension of colonialism and slavery, and a system that for half a millennium has served only to increase global inequality.

Plantation Fair Trade does not offer a viable economic alternative to global poverty, exploitation and marginalization; it strengthens the very system that caused it. Economic history has been a stream of “slight improvements”; colonial powers invaded the “south”, appropriated the land and resources, enslaved or murdered most of the population and marginalized the rest to the least productive lands. The end of political colonialism saw European plantation owners, regional despots, “princes” and “rajas”, who thrived under colonialism by adopting the disastrous plantation model, quickly fill the gap of colonial magistrates and virrey. Slavery was replaced by share-cropping and “slavery lite”. Colonial interests were replaced by American and British business interests, and then transnational business interests like Chiquita and Cargill; all of whom continue to rely on the plantation model to extract resources and “produce” profits; with the added benefit of decreasing production for local consumption, making laborers more reliant on food imports; graciously provided by Cargill.

Without the Fair Trade system to provide credit and access to export markets, there is no chance a small farmer with a few acres dedicated to subsistence agriculture and a small plot of bananas could compete with Chiquita, its $4.6 billion in annual revenue, and gargantuan banana plantations. In the case of bananas, 10% of banana production is intended for export (the so called “dessert bananas”), as opposed to their starchier cousins, plantains, which are a dietary staple grown by millions of small farmers across the southern hemisphere. (According to the recent book: Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas, edited by Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg.) Bananas could be a viable and potentially lucrative and empowering market for small farmers, but allowing plantations into the Fair Trade system has marginalized small banana producers even further and ensures that they will never be successful.

Even the United States has failed to rectify the destruction of its slave/plantation economy through slight improvements. Starting with post-Emancipation Proclamation share-cropping, the advent of the “minimum wage”, the civil rights movement and then affirmative action, improvements (similar to what plantation Fair Trade would represent) to the current labor model have not addressed, corrected or righted the destruction of the colonial-slave model. Are African-Americans better off today than they were in the early 1800′s? Yes. But that leaves much; everything, in fact; to be desired: Statistics vary widely, so I won’t quote them but let’s just say that the number of African-American men in jail compared to college is not something this country should be proud of. The same goes for the percent of unemployed African American men compared to white Americans. Plantation Fair Trade ignores the failures of “more fair” plantation-based economies throughout history.

What did work in the United States was an economy based on small land-holders in the Northeast and a decreased reliance on mono-crop exports. Fair Trade attempts to strengthen those economies in developing countries; to invest in small land-holders, who have the opportunity to accrue transformative assets like land (in the United States it is estimated that 44% of the average American’s wealth is in land or housing) and are infinitely more self-reliant through local cooperation and subsistence production. On a national level, vibrant local economies decrease dependence on foreign aid, food imports, and investment, and strengthen the ability of governments to resist egregious trade agreements and concessions.

And why, you have to wonder, are plantations and Wal-Mart so eager to join the Fair Trade system (well… to gain access to the certification)? Is it the goodness of their hearts? Or in that case wouldn’t they just pay workers a fair wage because it’s the right thing to do? Is it to raise their production costs through higher wages? To lower their margins for the benefit of Honduran banana farmers? Or is it that the success and hard work of small-farmer co-operatives and alternative trade organizations has led corporations and plantations to see the potential for profits in the Fair Trade system. Plantations, corporations and venture capital are banging on the doors of Fair Trade; begging for more quantity, more products, bigger, better, more streamlined supply-chains and relaxed regulations, because they see an opportunity to increase margins within their existing supply chains (i.e. plantations). They see people paying more for a tiny stamp on a bag of coffee; they want a piece of it. The farmers who built Fair Trade certainly don’t want plantations in the system. Many consumers are confused by the debate; they trust the seal and the ideology for which it once stood.

Co-operative Fair Trade is about empowerment of people (both producers and consumers) and communities. It’s about food sovereignty for people, here and in developing countries. For over twenty years, farmer cooperatives in the Fair Trade system have organized as a social and political force with which to be reckoned. Communities, tied together through economic ownership, have defined their values and developed according to their own paths of economic development. They are asserting influence and fielding politicians. Women have been empowered through shared assets and accountability, and development projects. Children are attending schools. Communities are growing their own organic food and rehabilitating the land. They are tiny green patches in the scarred and barren landscape of a scorched earth policy; vibrant local economies that value people and their connection to the earth.

Plantations, even those with labor unions and fair wages, represent continued dependence on patriarchal land-owners, predatory capital markets, transnational corporations and developed countries. American consumers should not be duped into supporting plantations because they agree to pay their workers a “fair wage”, we should be investing in a viable alternative that doesn’t rely on cheap labor and minority ownership. Allowing plantations into Fair Trade threatens to reverse the gains of the alternative trade movement, strengthen the competitive advantage of plantations and agribusiness, and further marginalize and exploit small farmers.