-Caveat Lector- banana hard farm hard work, low pay farmer paid only 4% of retail value Dave Hartley http://www.Asheville-Computer.com http://www.ioa.com/~davehart Secret life of a banana Politicians want free trade, but small producers need fair trade. Are the two incompatible? In the first of a series before the WTO talks, John Vidal visits the Caribbean Wednesday November 10, 1999 - London Guardian If you want to see the face of unfair trade, go to rundown, rotting Georgetown on the volcanic West Indian island of St Vincent. Start on the high street, where 82-year-old wheelchair-bound "Mamma Sun" sits as ever outside her half-stocked oddments shop. Skirt the narrow beach of the small decaying town, whose economy crashed when the sugar industry collapsed. Then head for the forest, stolen from the indigenous Caribs and felled by British colonists. There, on a sloping clearing, you'll likely find Kelvin Bristol, a small-scale banana farmer. Bristol has nine acres of bananas and, like almost everyone else on the island, most of what he grows goes to Britain. Bananas provide for his simple home, and school and health for his children. They give him weekly cash like no other crop can, save him from absolute poverty and allow him credit. Bananas are a way of life, his only imaginable future. Bristol is stopping work for the day. The fruit - very few these past months because he must replant much of his land after a violent rainstorm - have been picked and packed, and sent off to catch the weekly Geest boat in Kingstown. They will arrive in Southampton in two weeks and will be ripened, then sent to the supermarkets. But bananas don't stop growing and Bristol doesn't stop working. The land must be cleared, old plants grubbed up, new tubers planted and he's been digging holes, weeding, tending, de-flowering the young fruit, tying back the foliage to stop bruising and covering them in insecticide-drenched bags. And then he's had to pay people to wrap the cut fruit in more polythene, and arrange them in boxes as if they were bone china. Times move on. Just 10 years ago, he could simply cut the bananas, pack them loosely and send them off. Today, supermarkets will reject the tiniest bruises. No misshapen ones are accepted, none must be too long or too short, too ripe or misshapen, cut too carelessly or be too spotty. Bristol is a master of the understatement. "It real difficult now," he says. "Me work real hard. They want quality - no blemishes. Everything must be pretty, with no black marks. In the old days we could throw the bananas in the truck. Me just cut them in small clusters. Inputs used to be less. Now them sky high." There's a bunch of five bananas in Bristol's simple open sorting shed. They're small, sweet, thin-skinned and naturally spotty - not the flawless thicker-skinned giants we mostly get. But they would never meet the export standards so he was going to take them home. He offers them and we chat and chew. There's a hurricane 70 miles offshore reportedly heading towards St Vincent. If it comes, it will wreck years of work in just a few seconds. Like other islanders, he talks of his bananas in human terms. They come in "hands", have "backs" and "shoulders". They are "pretty" with "skins" and should be handled "like babies". He's upset with the cosy, complex, infernal politics of the banana trade and the international bodies who never consult people like him but leave him in ignorance and near destitution. And he's worried about the future. "If banana go, what can I do?" he says. "Plenty go in drugs. Into marijuana, especially in the mountains." We say that the small bunch might cost £1 to buy in Britain. It's a mistake to tell him. The information barely registers on his face of considerate stone. Then Bristol looks askance. His brow furrows and he starts to say something, but he stops, looks slowly to his banana field, where he's just spent hours of backbreaking toil to earn at most £3 today. "We wouldn't pay 50 cents (about 10p) for dem," he says quietly and painfully. Had we rushed out of the forest and mugged him, it probably couldn't have shocked him more. The banana trade is desperately unfair. Windward islands bananas are grown almost exclusively by peasant farmers like him. They get 10p a pound for top quality exports and just over half that for lesser quality. Even the top price barely covers the cost of insecticides, fungicides, fertilisers and the labour needed to produce the fruit that the supermarkets demand. Every 40lb box of prime fruit earns a farmer about £2 and costs another £3.50 to ship to Britain. By the time they get to the shelves - ripened to a shiny, uniform yellow, pretty as sweets, each a regulation size, shape, taste, weight and price - the contents of that box may sell for nearly £50. What begins in grind and deep uncertainty on a West Indian hillside ends with thumping great profits for everyone but the grower. In the past few years, says Renwick Rose, who runs the Windward Islands national farmers association (Winfa), one in three banana farmers have given up, realising that there is nothing but toil and sweat to be earned from growing them for export. Labour is increasingly expensive, he says. He con firms that some farmers are moving into the hills to grow marijuana. But the economic injustice is far deeper than the trading relationship between the vulnerable small growers and the powerful supermarkets. Ever since, in the 1950s, British foreign policy encouraged the West Indians and other Commonwealth countries to grow the world's favourite fruit and established a tariff and quota sytem to insulate small growers from the booming central American plantations, the islands have depended on us. That old arrangement is now in tatters because of the World Trade Organisation's ruling earlier this year that it was "unfair" to deny a market to the giant US and other agri-business corporations. Never mind that Bristol or the other West Indian farmers on their hillside patches will never compete on price in a free market with 10,000-acre industrialised plantations; that cheap "dollar bananas" may be grown in social squalor and lousy labour conditions; that union leaders are regularly shot for standing up for the basic rights of poor growers; that plantation owners make political contributions. The WTO has ruled, and social, ethical, moral and long-standing cultural arguments for trade protection are not negotiable. In the next few weeks, the EU must respond to the WTO ruling with proposals or the US may impose trade sanctions. The St Vincentians firmly believe that Britain and Europe will not "sell them down the river", but they also know that the ruling must change the special relationship. At best, change will come gently and the islands will have time to adapt. At worst, Bristol's world will collapse and the island economy will be in ruins. So what's to be done? Wilberforce Emmanuel is another St Vincentian farmer dependent on his few acres of bananas. But he is also fighting for a better deal for the farmers. He confirms their plight: "There's much more work and far less returns than in the past," he says. "The work is harder and the cost of living is now higher for everything. Once, you could make money. Now we can't make ends meet." If Europe fails to protect the growers, he says, it will be grim. "You must understand that bananas are not just a way of life, but they are part of us. Even if we are not protected, we will still have to grow bananas. We have no choice." He and many others are fighting for a fairer trading system. The best option, they believe, is the "fair trade" model that has evolved between Europe and some developing countries and now offers British consumers tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, honey and other Fairtrade products, all guaranteed by a mark which is issued after inspection and certification. Fairtrade bananas would mean supermarkets fixing an annual, guaranteed price at or near the price they pay for top quality fruit. It would include a premium which would go into a fund to be distributed as the farmers themselves chose. Result: everyone happy except the middlemen. But bananas are almost as complex as people, and getting Fairtrade bananas into Britain is beset with suspicions and fears, which have so far paralysed their arrival. The supermarkets worry that if they introduced some, it would imply that the conventionally grown bananas were judged to be unfair. The farmers, equally, don't want to divide themselves by favouring one group, or one island, over another. Fair trade would also mean that the farmers - who have traditionally worked independently - would have to set up democratically-constituted groups. And it would mean that the shippers and distributors, such as Geest, would have to be more accountable to the farmers. But everyone's greater fear is what happens when trade truly globalises in the next few years and the protection barriers tumble under the WTO. Paradoxically, says Phil Wells, of the Fairtrade Foundation in London, it could bring fair trade fruit to Britain in a big way and give the small growers a better deal. Supermarkets, he says, know that the price of bananas will drop as they flood in from every tropical country. Margins will erode and it will make commercial sense, in a much more socially and ecologically aware society, to offer top quality produce, guaranteed as ethical, to the more food-aware consumer. "I'm sure it will happen in 2000," Wells says. "Everyone wants it. It's a question of matching supermarkets with producers." But it needs to happen urgently. Finding and developing niche markets like fair or organic trade, allowing consumers to make real choices based on ethics, culture, history, ecological or broad social quality rather than price alone will become vital both for small island states and small producers everywhere. It is not far-fetched to see fair trade becoming a natural choice for consumers, and as important a market as organic is today, when the inequities of the global trading system intensify under WTO rules. It is equally possible that the US industrial agriculture lobby could theoretically challenge "ethical" trade under present WTO rules. So what could a healthy, fair trade in bananas mean for St Vincent? Renwick Rose says: "When you buy a cheap banana you are unwittingly participating in exploitation. People need to understand what lies behind a banana. There are children, mothers, fathers and blood, sweat and toil. Fair trade is not simply asking you to pay more, just what it costs." He is convinced it could improve environmental practices, increasing the sustainability of the island and a natural step towards organic farming. "Farming closer to nature helps society as a whole. Paying Fairtrade prices will get rid of the uncertainty of farmers, who are being driven out by high production costs. It would help in a real way with education and keeping the rural economy alive." Back on the hillside, Bristol is packing up. Hurricane Jose is gathering and there's little he can do. His message to British consumers is simple: "They must eat more West Indian bananas. It is good if we can get them to buy more, if we could sell directly to supermarkets. The middlemen get everything now. If banana go, everything gone. Then we in trouble. When bananas stop, I die." DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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