by Adam Calder, Produce Manager

Even though most people never think about it, they almost always buy bananas. If one were to stand in the produce department for a morning or afternoon and observe people shopping, one would see bananas go into almost every cart or basket. Most people reach for one of those golden bunches (or slightly green, however you prefer them) as a reflex action. It is merely what one does when shopping for fresh produce for the week: buy bananas! But why do people think this way?

Bananas are sweet, nutritious and widely available. They come in their own sturdy package (so please do not put them in single use plastic produce bags, nature already bagged that fruit for you!), are easy to peel and soft enough to be eaten by toddlers,the elderly and everyone in between. Bananas keep long enough so that most households can consume an entire bunch before they are too ripe, but even if they are too ripe to eat fresh they still make flavorful smoothies and breads. While bananas are appealing, and understandably so, the reasons for their prevalence may not be as tasty.

Bananas are big money and they have been for a long time. In 1870 they were sold in the streets of Boston at a 1,000% profit, and they have been making large profits for grocers ever since. The typical banana farmer makes little for their fruit in comparison to the profit made by conventional grocery stores. Just a few large, globally dominating banana companies have spent the past several decades convincing every man, woman and child that a banana is a cheap, ubiquitous and tasty food that should be eaten at every possible chance and they are not an exotic delicacy. These corporations have downplayed the fact that the only way for such wide availability and cheap prices to exist, and to still make money for grocers, is for the people who grow them and the land they are grown on to pay the price.

Conventional bananas are typically covered in pesticide-soaked plastic bags to protect them while they mature. These chemicals are harmful to the land that absorbs them and the people that are exposed to them. Even more discouraging, children under the age of 15 are commonly used as cheap sources of child labor to harvest and process these bananas.

Bananas do not come from trees, but rather a herbaceous flowering plant. The plant produces a crop of bananas and ceases banana production and a new plant is started from a sucker plant removed from the base of the original plant. This method of propagation results in huge tracts of land being used to grow bananas, and the intensity of the farming soon exhausts the nutrients stored in the soil.

Conventional bananas retail at the grocery store in the range of $.39 to .$79 a pound, and that is lower than the price Wheatsfield Cooperative pays when we buy organic bananas at wholesale costs. Bananas at Wheatsfield retail for $1.19 a pound, and the reason for that large price difference is this: we sell fair trade, organic certified bananas.

The fair trade workers in Ecuador who grow the majority of the bananas Wheatsfield sells are paid approximately $.48 a pound for their fair trade and certified organic bananas. If conventional bananas can retail for less than the price that fair trade banana farmers are paid for their work, then how much are the conventional farmers being paid? Fair trade workers are guaranteed a say in how they are managed and in how their plantation is run. They are allowed to form unions, to negotiate pay raises and there are a set of health and safety measures that must be met before a plantation can be fair trade certified. Fair trade plantations are not allowed to employ workers under 15, and the children over 15 they do hire are not allowed to work in jobs which are hazardous to their health. Conventional banana farmers are afforded no such benefits.

Wheatsfield’s bananas are also organic. Organic farming by definition must maintain and improve the quality of the soil, so even if a huge banana corporation grows organic bananas (which they are beginning to do) one is not left with huge tracks of dead, unusable land. So the next time you go to buy a banana, pause for a moment and think about what you are really getting. Is it a cheap, convenient, corporate profit-padding addition to your breakfast or is it a sustainable and ethically produced link to a hard working farmer in Ecuador?