Dan Koeppel's Blog

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 [...]

For decades, there have been calls for justice on the industrial plantations – and in the nations that support them – for banana workers. Progress has been spotty, at best, mostly because of a disconnect between those laborers and consumers of the world’s most popular fruit. The Banana Land Campaign is a new effort to [...]

PLUS: See the film in New York Wednesday, October 21, at 7:15 PM. Details here.

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 [...]

The Democracy Now radio program interviewed Nicholas Kozloff, who argued that there’s a Chiquita connection in the current Honduran political crisis, which saw President Manuel Zelaya deposed in either a coup or a constitutional emergency, or both, depending on which side you’re on, in June. The banana industry once made Honduras its largest exporting nation; [...]

CBS’s “60 Minutes” reran its May, 2008 segment, called “The Price of Bananas,” on Chiquita’s payments to a Colombian paramilitaries. New information included the extradition of a member of that group to the U.S., confirmation by additional sources, and the expansion of an investigation of similar alleged payments made by Dole.

Watch the report. Read a transcript.

Related [...]

I just got back from a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I was on assignment for National Geographic. More on that in the coming weeks. We were in the central part of the country. Eastern Congo – along the borders of Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda – has been locked in fighting for [...]

This exclusive report copyright 2008 www.bananabook.org.
Two of the world’s biggest banana companies, the American chemical companies who supply them, along with several other companies they do business with, are being sued by pilots, ground crew, and residents of the Ecuadorian plantation town of Puerto Viejo for health damage they allegedly suffered during years of spraying [...]

The biggest news item I avoid in this blog are banana trade wars. That’s because it would take me thousands and thousands of words to explain why the U.S., Europe, and the big banana companies have been fighting for years over who gets to sell bananas where. There have been resolutions that have led to [...]

You really can’t help it when you see stuff like this. What does this mean? I can’t tell, because – and this is another news flash – Chiquita has redesigned its website so that it de-emphasizes bananas – and made it unnavigable in the process (I tried to find some kind of marketing info on [...]