Making the Most of Banana January 2009
Scaling-up - not another banana republic?
Alistair Smith: Director of Trade NGO
Summary:
The biggest banana exporters in the world can be found in South America. However, banana traders are turning their attention to Africa as a new source of bananas for the global market. Director of a banana-trade NGO, Banana Link, explains why this is happening and the implications for African banana production. In particular, he advises smallholder farmers that the export market is unlikely to be their best option when looking to sell their crop.
Suggested introduction:
Banana is a common crop across Africa. Although in some places larger banana-growing businesses are springing up - as in Somalia, Kenya and Ghana - it is still the fruit from small farms that feed Africans.
However there is one part of the world where bananas are big, big business. And that's Latin America. In countries such as Honduras, Peru, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Ecuador, banana plantations of up to 2,000 hectares in size grow fruit for export to Europe and North America. These plantations provide employment for thousands of workers and much needed foreign exchange earnings to national economies.
The companies that established the Latin American banana business 100 years ago are now turning their attention to Africa.
Talking with Zambian journalist Sanday Kabange on the sidelines of the International Banana and Plantain Conference in Mombasa, Kenya is Alistair Smith. As Director of the NGO Banana Link, he was just back from a trip bringing Latin American banana workers to share their experiences with counterparts in Ghana. Sanday asked him why big banana companies are now interested in setting up plantations in Africa.
Tape in:
From a production point of view...
Tape out:
...the question. It's too cruel a market.
Closing Announcement:
Alistair Smith, director of the NGO Banana Link, cautious about the prospects for Africa's smallscale banana farmers profiting from international markets.
Making the most of it:
Invite a marketing advisor to suggest how banana farmers can find better paying markets, either for fresh fruit or for banana products. Should they be thinking local, national, regional, or further afield?
Further information:
Alistair Smith,
Banana Link / European Banana Action Network (Euroban),
38 Exchange Street, Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 1AX, United Kingdom,
Email: blink2005@wanadoo.fr, info@bananalink.org.uk,
www.bananalink.org.uk
Transcript
Smith
From a production point of view, Africa has a number of advantages, which is why the big fruit companies are very interested in Africa at the moment and why they are moving in. And that is that it has less disease build-up for the main diseases which attack commercial banana plantations. It has a number of places where the soil type is particularly good. But I think the real reasons why the big companies are now moving into Africa in the last year or so, is because they see that they can produce cheaply here. They can produce cheaply here because labour is cheap and they are able to use less cycles of pesticides than in Latin America where the build-up of disease is very big. But there is another reason which is to do with trade, because at the moment Africa has free access to the European market, to the EU market which is not the case for Latin America. But as you can imagine the shift to Africa is very worrying for the people who depend on the banana industry in Latin America. However damaging it's been, it's their livelihood, it's their employment, and the threat to the companies to abandon Latin America and move to Africa is going to cause a lot of problems.
Kabange
I'm going to hold you on within Latin America. Can you just describe for us maybe what is it like, these plantations, large-scale plantations of Latin America? Just give us a picture of how it looks like.
Smith
Well some people call them grey deserts because there's almost no other life. You won't see any snakes, you won't see any birds, you see virtually no butterflies. So in terms of biodiversity, there's almost none. From a point of view of somebody who works in that plantation, typically they would be working maybe 60 to 70 hours a week, six days a week. The rhythm of work is very fast. But I think above all, there are two things that are the most worrying about what happens in a Latin American plantation. One is the way workers are treated. Whenever they try to come together to organise to improve the conditions, to negotiate with their employers they, in many cases they are prevented from doing so; in some cases even violently. And the other side of it is the huge quantity of pesticides that are being applied. The people who receive most directly the toxic pesticides are the people who apply them in the field. There is a constant permanent exposure to toxic pesticides which obviously has very serious effects on workers' health. So if you go to a Latin American plantation today you don't see many workers who are over 40 years old because the work is so dangerous that people have a variety of injuries and accidents and health complaints which prevent them from being employable beyond that kind of age.
Kabange
Where in Africa are banana conditions going perfect?
Smith
Well the two countries which traditionally, until now provided most of Africa's exports are Cameroon and the Cote d'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast. But the new countries where the multinationals are moving in at the moment are Ghana, Angola and Mozambique, for various reasons; because of soil conditions, climatic conditions, access to the ports.
Kabange
Is there potential for Africa to scale up from those areas that you have mentioned?
Smith
I think the nature of the industry means that they will try and scale up from their base in those countries. So those three countries may well, you may well see an expansion there. But if you look at most parts of West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, I honestly don't think that the smallscale African banana farmer is going to get any look in on the international banana market. I think the smallscale banana farmer in Africa, for me it's much more important that they play a role in food security, that they improve their farming systems to be able to feed the growing urban population in Africa itself, in their own countries.
Kabange
Now Alastair you brought a team of trade unionists from Latin America, you took them to Ghana. What did they say? What did they talk about?
Smith
Well they had many surprises. The first one was that the rhythm of work is very, very different. People don't work like crazy like they do in a Latin American plantation. People work at a more relaxed pace, that was one of the first things they noticed. Another issue they noticed was that people are very unaware of health and safety issues in the plantation. They were also able on the positive side to compare fairtrade models. We had colleagues from Peru where there are small farmers certified and from Ecuador where there are both big plantations and small farmers. So they were able to compare information about how workers should and could benefit from fairtrade and the desire by consumers increasingly in the North to buy bananas from sources which they know to respect minimum social and environmental standards.
Kabange
What would you feel is the best option for Africa, especially regarding banana production and plantation?
Smith
I think, in summary, fresh fruits for local and national markets; and then processed products I think the Ugandan example is very important, the banana flour example and the huge number of products that can be made from banana flour. I think there is enormous potential for many countries in Africa there, for the local and national market. And if that market is successful and food security improves in Africa, then maybe look at the international market, but only on processed products. I think trying to sell fresh fruit to the international market for the majority of African farmers is simply out of the question. It's too cruel a market. End of track.
