Environment

 

The monkeys at Copenhague zoo prefer to eat organic bananas and other fruits, leaving aside the conventional counterparts. “For one reason or another, the tapirs and chimpanzees are choosing organically grown bananas over the others. Maybe they are able to instinctively tell the difference and their choice is not at all random” reveals keeper and feeder Niels Melchiorsen in an interview for Oekologisk Jodbrug (Organic Agriculture) magazine. "The chimpanzees are able to tell the difference between the organic and the regular fruit. If we give them organic and traditional bananas, they systematically choose the organic bananas, which they eat with the skin on.”

“But they peel the traditional bananas before eating them," he added. The Copenhague zoo aims to offer 33% organic feed to their animals by 2005.

 

 

In conventional agriculture each banana bunch is covered with a plastic bag laden with pesticides. Some producers wash these bags to reuse them or transform them into “corbatines” and sold to others. This “recycling” is generally operated by the women at home, with children, as this is a source of complementary income for them.

 

In all the banana producing countries, the most important environmental risk is linked to the aerial fumigations, the spread of which largely surpasses the banana plantation limits, affecting inhabited zones, schools, individual houses and other cultivations. On this subject, it is important to remember that although 50 to 60 annual fumigation cycles are necessary in Costa Rica, only half this amount is used in Ecuador.

 

 

The fumigations, whether aerial or sprayed, are done in most producing countries while the agricultural workers are labouring in the plantation. Their effects are inevitable. More and more studies make a case of dermatological diseases, neurological disorders and other health problems such as lumbago, linked to the physical overburden of labour. New techniques are now able to demonstrate that the workers are clearly exposed to pesticides. We will learn their negative side effects within a few years, if nothing is done to bring them to term. Oncological studies also show an increase in cancer occurrence, for certain tumors, for agricultural workers in banana plantations. The sad experience with Nemagon (DiBromoChloroPropane), a nematicide which left innumerable plantation workers sterile is still not settled. The Standard Fruit co. (Dole) and the companies that produced and commercialised this nematicide for which they already knew the health risks still haven’t compensated the producers. The populations that live around the banana plantations are also affected by the pollution. Researchers have found chemical products, the same ones used to spray on banana trees, inside the individual houses, schools and playgrounds.

 

In certain plantations the fumigation is systematic, whether done aerially or sprayed, even if the workers are present or if they return before the permitted time laps. In Ecuador, they occur during the workers’ lunch break, which have to stay at their work stations. Likewise, in the packing stations it is not only the bag handling which poses a health risk for the workers (a bag contains 1% chlorpyrifos) but also the daily contact with the “corbatines”, at times also laden with pesticides.

 

 

In Ecuador where the industry directly employs 250 000 workers, an employee’s monthly salary on a banana plantation is around 120$; or 4.56$ per day.

 

In Ecuador, the simple legal obligations, such as the elaboration and presentation of a rule on safety and hygiene in the company or the respect of measures advocated by the committees are rarely implemented on the plantations. In 2003, on 6 200 producers, including 200 large companies, only eight applied the regulations in effect from the Ministry of Labour. There exists no program, nor any action made at the national level aimed at applying the existing legislations, whether they are those from the Ministry of Labour, of Health, of the Environment or of Social Security (which, by the way, are also responsible). We can conjure many different attenuating circumstances, such as the lack of personnel, the limitations of technical means and even the lack of motivation. The fact is, however, that there is an absence of political willpower in this country, even though there are legislations.

 

 

In the whole region, banana companies are laying off female workers in the packing plant to be replaced by ex-unemployed men, of which there are more and more. Men don’t get pregnant and so they cost less!

 

 

« The attempts at organizing unions have provoked the shifting of production to non-unionized zones, in which any attempt to unionize is strongly reprimanded. This has particularly happened in the nationalized plantations, such as those located in the South Pacific zone in Guatemala. In these plantations, agricultural labourers work 14 to 16 hours per day, their overtime hours are not paid and don’t get any supplemental income for working on holidays or Sundays. The distance between their housing and their work forces them very often to wake up at 3 in the morning and to come home only after 10 at night.”

 

These last years, the pressures on directly and indirectly employed labourers have been very strong. For example, in Costa Rica between 1999 and 2002, the salaries have diminished by 40% and the majority of workers are now actually employed by subcontracting companies. “Indirect employment gives more flexibility to companies in order to react to fluctuating demands, but it is also used because it allows reduced influence from unions. In Ecuador, in accordance with the legislation in effect, a union may only put in place in companies employing more than 30 workers. The banana companies didn’t take long to exploit this situation: in repression to the manifestations of its labourers, Noboa has generalised its recourse to contractual workers in its plantations in Ecuador, which have passed from 3 in 2002 to 25 in 2003, so that each subcontractor does not hire more than 30 labourers!”

 

 

- Intensive agriculture

The pesticides used by the companies are various. Their effects are generally known and it is for this reason that it’s important to explain how they affect the environment in banana production.

 

During the establishment period, the banana groves occupy vast stretches of land and destroy all the intermediary ecosystems and all other types of cultivations. The clearing, fertilising, ploughing of soils and cultivation of the plant, strictly speaking, all have strong consequences on the neighbouring ecosystems of which entire sections disappear in just a few weeks.

 

Monoculture does the rest: it eliminates the organic competitors and sterilises the soil. The relocation of banana groves in the Esmeraldas and Santo Domingo provinces to Guayas, El Oro and Los Rios has left behind them hectares of totally sterile land where it is impossible to grow anything else, because of the state of the soil and the high cost for its eventual restoration for the new producer or investor. Pineapple, which has replaced bananas in certain plantations, is one of the rare cultivations that can grow after the fact. These problems are not past problems; they are reproduced every time the companies relocate. We need more information on the way Guatemala, Panama and Ecuador actually manage the addition of more than 20 000 hectares of plantations. The enormous water consumption leads to a deviation of water ways and constitutes an increasing danger for the populations who, downstream, use it for their own consumption; washing clothes, food preparation and personal hygiene.

 

In Ecuador, the advancing of agricultural zones on the coast and on the mountain hillsides is being done very aggressively. The mountains suffer from the erosion and the increasing sedimentation entails drought, which in turn contributes to the alteration of the riverbeds.

 

The banana producing region of Ecuador includes a permanent hardwood forest which is an ecosystem of vegetation planted with trees of more than 30 meters in height, of the Arecaceous, Moraceous, Meliaceous, Lauraceous and Fabaceous families. Most of the plantations are found in this sector. The north part of the forest has been completely devastated.

 

Manglares-Churute is an ecological reserve (of 35.042 hectares) located downstream of the Rio Guayas in a central part of the forest which still survives today. The southern part has also disappeared. The forest located at the foot of the hills has more dispersed arboreal vegetation, where the trees don’t reach more than 20 meters in height, and a very dense herbaceous layer without grasses. Apart from a few rare isolated zones, the major part of all this has disappeared. The Mountatin Cloud Forest, the high desert plateau of Pasaje and the scrubland of El Guabo have also disappeared.

 

The Machala Mangroves have been destroyed by the shrimp industry and 30% by the banana companies.

 

In Ecuador, the volume of plastic waste reaches around 12 581 tonnes per year, with 9 340 tonnes coming from the big company plantations, 2 447 from medium “semi-technological” plantations and 793 from small parcels.