Ethical bananas

By Christine Ottery

Bananas are the favourite fruit of Britain. According to 2009 figures from TNS, Brits spend £587 million a year on bananas, and so choosing to buy Fairtrade can actually be a powerful consumer decision.
“You are getting more money back down to the primary producer and less money going to the plantations, that’s a very important choice,” says Professor Tim Lang, a food policy expert at City University London.

As many as one in four bananas on our shelves in the UK is Fairtrade, as certified by the Fairtrade Foundation, with some supermarkets, such as Waitrose and Sainsbury’s selling only these types of bananas. So it has never been easier to get our mitts on these bendy yellow fruit. But how does it work when we buy Fairtrade?

For the customer, it could means a slight increase in price, although currently Sainsbury’s Fairtrade bananas are 17p each, the same as Tesco’s which are not Fairtrade (although they do sell a Fairtrade pack as well, normally working out at 25p each, now on offer for 20p each).

However, it may be worth spending a few pennies more to buy the ethical option. Mike Gidney, the deputy director of the Fairtrade Foundation, tells me that Fairtrade helps banana growers to build a future for themselves. This is because, for small-scale farmers, prices they get from their harvests can fluctuate wildly. The minimum price that the farmers get who are growing Fairtrade bananas get is “a huge lifeline”, he says.

A report conducted by the Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, for the Fairtrade Foundation, reviewed several case studies to determine the impacts of Fairtrade on the producers. The review found that Fairtrade offers farmers greater stability and security, giving them the opportunity to invest in their businesses and grow them.

For example, the Windward Islands in the Caribbean sell 70 per cent of their bananas on a Fairtrade basis. “But what they are doing now,” says Gidney, “which is brilliant, is going out of bananas – and into ecotourism and packaging and processing. This is real step change to them.”

In addition to the stability that a fixed minimum price offers, premiums are paid to Fairtrade producers for community improvement purposes. These are chosen by co-ops of growers. Lang says: “It makes a huge amount of difference as to people’s livelihoods, their health, whether their kids go to school… it’s just vast.” For example, in the Windward Islands, they have spent their premiums on a range health and fair trade projects.

Fairtrade vs free trade

Fairtrade has its detractors, though. Critics from the Adam Smith Institute, a free market think tank, say that fair trade interventions limit the amount of profit that small producers are able to make and sets prices artificially high for the consumer.

One skeptic and writer, Simon Perry, writes that: “Instead of opting for ethically labelled packaging that makes us feel good about ourselves, perhaps we should be doing something that offers a genuine chance of improving the lives of the impoverished – campaigning to eliminate trade barriers and putting an end to farming subsidies.”
However, the free market has too little regulation, as we have recently seen with the banking crisis. Gidney says: “[free] trade is an incredibly uneven playing field, when you think about economies as disparate as the UK’s economy and an economy in Africa, Malawi for example. It is completely crazy to say we can operate on a free trading basis without Malawi being at a substantial disadvantage.”

“There has been 200 years of discussion about free trade. The terms ‘free’ and ‘trade’ sound absolutely wonderful when put together, but the realities are more complicated, we don’t have free trade,” says Lang. He tells me this is because powerful countries and corporations set the terms and conditions of trade.

Only a month ago, the EU lifted its preferential trade agreements to growers in the Caribbean. The Fairtrade Foundation was concerned that, although this had been in the pipeline for some time, there was very little help for Caribbean farmers from the EU, in terms of financial or technical assistance to adjust to the fact their bananas would suddenly be more expensive for retailers to buy. “They are really caught on the hop and saying they really need Fairtrade more than ever, to get the minimum price and the premium,” says Gidney.

There is hypocrisy in the fact that European farmers are subsidised to produce fruit while the counties in the developing world are having their preferential tariffs removed.

Blood bananas

Lang couches the fair trade versus free trade debate in strong terms: “To say whether this is a matter of free trade or protectionism completely misses the point. The point is: do you want blood on your bananas or do you want to have some dignity with your bananas?”

In a recent case, a large multi-national company called Chiquita, which is the biggest distributor of the fruits in the US, admitted to funding paramilitary groups to protect their large plantations in Colombia. They paid damages of $25 million.

In the past banana companies have been criticised for creating what are called “banana republics”, which are corrupt collusions between state and corporation, usually occurring when an industry accounts for a large proportion of GDP. For instance, at one time 60 per cent of Honduras’ exports were bananas. The political ramifications can reach far and wide, including the suppression of worker’s rights.

The most ethical banana

Ethics isn’t just about worker’s rights, however compelling. The magazine Ethical Consumer judges its reviews of products on many criteria, including: environmental impact, political activities and sustainability.

Both Gidney and Lang swerve the question of what the most ethical banana would be, where it would come from. Lang says he thinks there is too much labelling on products and would prefer a single “Good Food” label for products that protect worker’s rights and are nutritious.

Rob Harrison, the editor of Ethical Consumer, says that from a consumer point of view, buying bananas that bear both the Fairtade and the Organic marks is one of the best options if you can find them, as organic farming methods around the world mean that biodiversity is preserved, and workers are not exposed to pesticides. This is reflected in the price, with Fairtrade ‘So Organic’ bananas in Sainsbury’s edging towards 30p each.

But Ethical Consumer’s 2006 report on bananas tips Fairtrade Windward Island bananas as the most ethical, because, Harrison points out, have a particular dependency on this crop and need all the sales they can get. It is possible to buy Caribbean bananas in a range of supermarkets, and these tend to cost around 23p.

So, is it more ethical to buy fairtrade, organic bananas or fairtrade bananas from the Windward Isles? Harrison says: “Both are an ethical choice. It will ultimately be each individual’s call as to whether to prioritise a specific development goal (Windward Islands) over a general raising of production standards towards sustainability.”
In terms of carbon footprint, as we are not able to grow bananas in the UK, they have to be shipped in from Latin America or the Caribbean. There’s no way around the fact that our nation’s favourite fruit has high carbon emission collateral. One American journalist calculated that gobbling a banana every day would eat up nearly half of personal CO2 footprint targets as set out on the website Eat Low Carbon Diet.

To solve that particular problem means buying local fruit, such as apples and pears, instead of bananas. But if you are hooked on the curvy yellow fruit, as many of us are, take comfort from the Fairtrade and Organic marks or Windward Isle labelling to know you are supporting small-scale growers in the developing world.

Other Elements articles in which you might be interested:

1. Fair Trade at City