Not the Trader Joe's price.

First up, the above fruit, at five for 5.00. That’s not per kilo, that’s per fruit. With the Aussie dollar trading about even with U.S. currency, that’s the A NEW RECORD for fruit sold at a standard market – over $10USD per pound, and that’s a “special.” (Maybe my math is wrong. Let me know; I’m comparing at six ounces per fruit.) Compare that to Trader Joe’s, in the U.S., which sells bananas – imported from Latin America – five for a single buck.

A little better?

These go for $3.49 per kilo, or $1.58 per pound. Using the standard index of six ounces per fruit, that’s a pricey 59 cents per. Ouch.

More like it, but still…

This bunch, at the equivalent of 90 cents per pound U.S., was at Aldi, which bills itself as “Australia’s Cheapest Supermarket.” But even that’s a high price; no major U.S. supermarket chain that I know of charges more than 79 cents.

ANALYSIS: So, why the premium? One would think that since these are local fruit, prices would be much lower. Not so, for two reasons.  Australia is a first-world country, which means that banana workers there are paid a living wage. That’s different than the U.S. system of banana economics, which still relies on exploitative labor arrangements in Latin America, source of all our fruit. Second, Australia isn’t looking at the Panama Disease scourge that threatens to wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop; it is fighting the disease now, with less-than-encouraging results (at least in the field. In the lab, things may be better. See my Australia page for related posts.) Supply and demand affects banana prices everywhere, as I wrote last year in the New York Times. Our future probably involves higher prices, because of banana disease, but it also isn’t crazy to wonder why third-world workers shouldn’t be paid a wage that would give them the same kind of economic status as Aussie banana laborers. But they’re not, and they suffer because of it – and because we insist on banana with record-shattering low prices, like these I recently saw on a Los Angeles street corner.

Under the Manhattan Bridge, a special banana. © 2010, Dan Koeppel

The corporate banana monoculture, based on the Cavendish variety – which accounts for 99% of the world’s export crop – is both doomed and dangerous. Diseases are striking the world crop, forcing increased used of pesticides (when the diseases are curable, which isn’t always the case.) Reliance on a single, commodity fruit makes it impossible to do anything but exploit workers and land – it would be too expensive to do otherwise. The banana industry, however, refuses to budge from the monoculture, for the most part, saying it is impossible to import any other variety in bulk.

But that’s exactly what is being done in so-called ethnic markets. Here’s a shot I took last month of an alternate variety, commonly known as “apple” bananas, being sold under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown.

What does this mean? The fruit comes from Del Monte, one of the world’s largest banana importers (though it isn’t a major presence in the U.S.) I’d ask the question: does “impossible” mean that systems really can’t be developed, or that the major banana outfits – Dole and Chiquita – are simply afraid (or lack the creativity) to run their banana business as anything but the boring, exploitative, and doomed entity of the past century?

By the way, those under-the-bridge fruit are amazingly good. Try one – let it ripen to a rather brown, speckled state, a little more than you might for a conventional banana – and you’ll be rewarded with complex flavor, creamy texture, and pure fruit satisfaction.

Boing Boing is my favorite website. The editors there are constantly scooping me on banana gadgets, and this reflects poorly on me. So, this year’s banana holiday gift guide is (apologetically) shoplifted  from a bunch of posts BB ran earlier this month, and which it rightfully applied the “awesome” tag to.

A banana peeler. Official name: The “Banana Splitter,” from Book of Joe.

A banana saver. From Organize.com.)

A banana ripening bag, from Lakeland kitchen supplies, U.K.

A banana “sheath.” Grotesque, from the Museum of Modern Art store, NYC.

"El Presidente." Image from Allan Sanders "Loopland." (Click to check out his gorgeous illustration portfolio.)

Marcelo Bucheli – of the University of Illinois at Urbana and Champaign College of Business – published a fascinating paper on the relationship between the United Fruit company (Chiquita) and Latin American dictatorships. Here’s the abstract:

“The US multinational United Fruit Company has been considered the quintessential representative of American imperialism in Central America. Not only did the company enjoy enormous privileges in that region, but also counted on authoritarian governments in dealing with labor unrest. The literature assumes that United Fruit and the dictators were natural allies due to their opposition to organized unionism. This paper shows that this alliance could only survive as long as the multinational provided the dictators with economic stability for the country. However, when the multinational proved to be incapable of doing that, the dictators allied with the working class to confront the multinational and extract higher rents from it.”

Bucheli is one of the most respected and thoughtful banana scholars out there. His work was primary source material for my book. You can read the whole paper (PDF download) here. (Thanks to Steven Kinzer, another primary source, for the link.)

These are the campaign’s “Six Things You Can Do” to help make the changes that just about anyone who knows banana history need to happen:

1. Sign a petition, here.

2. Write or call Dole and Chiquita’s (Chiquita doesn’t provide a email but you can write them on here) Corporate Social Responsibility Departments and ask them to make meaningful compensation to the victims of AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) violence in the banana lands and improve their labor relations. For US citizens: Write your congressperson and Senator. There is already an investigation by Congressman Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts. being pursued in relation to Colombian paramilitary payments made by U.S. companies. However, more pressure is needed if we want to see results. Apathy gets us nowhere, only by demanding action from your government and expressing your disdain for what Dole and Chiquita have engaged in will your government see the value in pursuing this issue. You pay their salaries through your taxes, PUT THEM TO WORK!

CSR Department for Dole:
dole_consumercenter@na.dole.com
Sylvain Cuperlier
Vice President – Director of Worldwide Corporate Social Responsibility
Dole Food Company, Inc.
+33 (0) 1 44 17 30 60

CSR Department for Chiquita:
http://www.chiquitabrands.com/CompanyInfo/ContactUs.aspx
Corporate Headquarters:
Chiquita Brands International, Inc.
250 East Fifth Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202 USA
+513-784-8000

Write Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt and let him know you think it’s important that he continue his investigation into this issue:
William.Delahunt@mail.house.gov
Washington, DC
2454 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-3111
Fax: 202-225-5658

South Shore Office
1250 Hancock Street
Suite 802-N
Quincy, MA 02169
617-770-3700
Toll-Free: 800-794-9911
Fax: 617-770-2984

Cape and Islands Office
146 Main Street
Hyannis, MA 02601
508-771-0666
Toll-Free: 800-870-2626
Fax: 508-790-1959

3. Travel directly to the affected areas in Colombia. Witness For Peace and other groups are beginning delegations to the banana zone. Here you can see first hand what has occurred and work with local experts on coming up with solutions for the affected communities. For more information visit the Witness For Peace Delegations to Colombia website.

4. Volunteer for the campaign and use your talents to help bring a solution for the affected workers and families. We have space for generalists and specialists in tech, public relations, research, outreach, education, networking and more. Are you an artist? Create a piece related to this issue and we will feature it on our website. Only with a dedicated network of volunteers can we make this campaign a success. Contact Brenna McLaughlin at bl.campaign@gmail.com for more info.

5. Support La Isla Foundation through a donation. La Isla Foundation is coordinating the campaign and needs your support. If you don’t have money but have time you can organize a fundraising event for the campaign and the affected communities. No donation is too small, the key to success is broad based support. Contact Jason Glaser at laislafoundation@gmail.com to donate or organize an event. Soon you will also be able to donate directly at: bananalandcampaign.org

6. Eat locally as much as possible. It’s nutritious, it can be a lot of fun, it’s great for getting to know your area and community better and it takes the demand away from industrialized food and the nasty consequences it brings. (Note from Dan: Not so sure on this one, but…)

The campaign will be kicking off December 6, 2009, with a party/premiere at The Harlem School of the Arts in New York City. Open bar, music, and speakers (including me; my talk will almost certainly be made more fascinating by the free drinks.) I’ll have some comments on the campaign’s goals after the event. I hope to meet you there.

Link: Banana Land Campaign website; press release; Facebook group.

Image from USA Today.

The reason we have only one kind of banana – out of the 1,000+ found worldwide – is partly an issue of transportation: every banana type ripens differently and has widely varying levels of fragility. In the 1950s, when the “original” commercial banana, the Gros Michel, was going functionally extinct, Dole came up with the idea of bagging and boxing a potential replacement fruit – the Cavendish – in order to allow it to survive the long trip from the tropics to our stores. The plan worked, and the banana industry was saved.

Today, as disease ravages the global Cavendish crop, packing and shipping technologies are once again becoming key to replacing the commercial fruit. At the same time, bananas compete more and more with candy and other junk food at convenience stores, where branding and presentation beyond an oval sticker might be a plus (at least in terms of marketing.)

Del Monte and 7-Eleven seem to believe just that and have begun, at about 30 stores near the convenience store giant’s Dallas headquarters, a small retail test of bagged and branded bananas. The packaging is designed to extend the shelf-life of the fruit from two to five days. (I’m not sure how the convenience store chain came up with those timeframes, actually. Bananas should be able to stay on sale for more than 48 hours if handled properly.) “Our customers want yellow bananas — not brown,” Joseph DePinto, CEO of the convenience chain, told USA Today. (I’ve written about convenience store fruit before. It hasn’t really worked out that well for the big banana companies.)

Since I’m not in Texas, I haven’t handled the packaging, but from the picture, it looks a lot like something a high-end produce distributor called Melissa’s uses for plantain sold in California supermarkets; Chiquita also made a try with a similar form of packaging a few years ago. It used a membrane-like coating and a special device that separated the fruit; the system was designed by a Boston consultancy called Gen3 Partners; you can read about the product here.

In a published case study, Gen3 quotes Chiquita as saying: “We have been in business for over one hundred years. We need to shake up our markets with new innovation.” Environmentalists rightly see this kind of innovation as problematic, and I agree,  but with mixed feelings. I’d be happy if the new wrappers somehow made the fruit a more likely buy – over junk food – at convenience stores.

The bigger issue is that new production technology is desperately needed in the banana world – though not necessarily to make the fruit a convenience store favorite.  The fruit industry continues to rely on Cavendish, and only Cavendish. That fruit is doomed (read my book or see this article), and no amount of packaging can change that. But in order to save bananas as a consumer product, the industry will need to develop new technologies to deliver new bananas to consumers – just as Dole did fifty years ago, and tougher, ripeness-delaying packaging will be a part of that. Is this particular experiment a step in the right direction? Not sure – but it is a step.

Fake Banana | Significant Objects ; tip from the fabulous Siel at GreenLAGirl…

But still not cuddly. Image: Fresh Plaza

After pressure from the Swedish government  - efforts to boycott the banana company were underway, with a strong chance they would spread to other EU nations – Dole dropped a lawsuit it had filed against Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and his film, “BANANAS!*”, which tells the story of the company’s pesticide use in the 1970s and the damage that practice inflicted on Nicaraguan workers.

Here’s the full text of Dole’s statement:

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CALIFORNIA – October 14, 2009 Dole Food Company, Inc. today announced that it is dismissing its defamation lawsuit against filmmakers Fredrik Gertten, Margarete Jangård and WG Film AB in the Los Angeles Superior Court, relating to the film BANANAS!*.

Dole made its decision in light of the free speech concerns being expressed in Sweden, although it continues to believe in the merits of its case. Dole strongly believes in freedom of speech and expression, which are so important in Sweden and the United States. [Emphasis added. Dole's view of our own First Amendment rights is, apparently, mostly, afterthought.]

“While the filmmakers continue to show a film that is fundamentally flawed and contains many false statements we look forward to an open discussion with the filmmakers regarding the content of the film,” said C. Michael Carter, Dole’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel.

I wrote about Dole’s financial motivation for suppressing in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper earlier this month; the English version of the story is here. While this is a great win for the film, the question that has to be asked is  why it took Swedish concerns about free speech to kill the court action. Unfortunately, I can answer that: institutions in the U.S. – ranging from our government to the Los Angeles Film Festival (which shamefully caved to Dole pressure and disavowed the film, a measure that seems all the more cowardly given this news), as well as much of our national media - generally didn’t see the banana company’s action as something worth questioning, let alone resisting.

What next? Well, if you happen to be in New York, you’ll have a chance to see the film this coming Wednesday, as part of the CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival. Gertten will be there to answer questions (I’m going to be in attendance, as well.) One hopes that U.S. distributors will now be more open to putting the film in widespread circulation.

It is important to remember that the Nicaraguan story continues, and Dole’s attempts to discredit those who’d hold it responsible for its actions remains underway, too, as the below ad, auto-placed alongside the Los Angeles Times account of the lawsuit’s end, shows.

One more thing: the Dole release states that the company “is dismissing” the lawsuit. Actually, the proper term is “dropping.” Only a judge can dismiss a suit, something that comes with finding that suit invalid. Standard corporate press release nano-literacy or Freudian admission of the dopiness of the strategy to begin with?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the chain is owned by Walmart, which has – in the U.S. – undercut Chiquita and Dole by sourcing its own unbranded fruit, and has added a new twist to the strategy by offering Fair Trade product in 100 of its stores, according to an announcement made last week. (I’ve got issues with Fair Trade – more on that next week.)