Several thoughts ran through my mind at that moment and for some days afterwards. To begin, it’s worth going through the history of the Chiquita banana brand so you can understand my overreaction to a piece of fruit. Chiquita, formerly known as the United Fruit Company, is an international producer and distributor of bananas. The UFC was founded in 1899, aggressively monopolising large areas of land in Latin American nations such as Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. This land was bought cheap and only some of it was used for agriculture, thus depriving locals of swathes of arable land.
During the Cold War, when poor working conditions (low pay, long hours, dangerous environments) and unionisation demands triggered labour movements, the UFC hired paramilitary groups to meet those movements head-on with violence. In fact, only in June this year did they pay damages to the families of those murdered by a Colombian paramilitary group they hired, the AUC. The amount? A mere $38.3 million,1 a tiny dent in their annual revenues of $3 billion.2 Local regimes they partnered with were also utilised, the Colombian regime’s military being sent to massacre 47 to 2000 striking plantation workers in what has been labelled the “Banana Massacre”, a subversively tragic name.
However, when the labour movements got bigger and entered governments, the US government was called in to “save the day”. Seeing the plight of the Guatemalan people at the hands of the UFC, Jacobo Árbenz, upon his 1950 election victory, decided to help the poor by redistributing uncultivated land to them. The issue? This included 85% of the land that the UFC owned.3 Unfortunately for Árbenz, the UFC disapproved. They lobbied the US government into orchestrating a CIA-backed coup against the Árbenz government in 1954 by stoking anti-communist paranoia. Just to repeat: a banana company overthrew a government. In 1984, the UFC rebranded itself as “Chiquita” to distance themselves from their exploitative past, though continuing the same exploitative practices, thus giving us the blue and yellow banana stickers we have today.
Returning to the stickers, you now understand my alarm at seeing these bananas sold in our university shop. Knowing the history of Chiquita, I understandably decided to not buy one and settled for the last remaining pear instead. A week later, I then decided to write this article to spread some awareness of the history behind the products that students unknowingly purchase and thus support. After all, Chiquita isn’t going to provide this information themselves.
However, I started to realise soon after that my choice to not purchase the banana was rather pointless. After all, Dole and Del Monte, the other two major banana brands alongside Chiquita, have also been criticised for similar exploitative practices.4 Is there any point in writing this article, knowing the near futility of sourcing ethically produced bananas? And even if I, or others, exchanged bananas for other fruits, such as the pear I chose to purchase that day, what if that was also unethically sourced? As busy students, we simply don’t have the time to check every item we consume or purchase. So, should we even bother attempting to practice ethical consumption in the first place?
My answer: even though striving towards the ideal of total ethical consumption is practically impossible, it is still our responsibility to do our bit where we can. We can’t check everything, but we can check some things. When ethical consumption seems impossible, we can still pick the least bad option – going back to that pear, I found no results for a “pear massacre” ever occurring. It’s about doing what you can when you can. As of writing this article it’s reading week, so I am practising exactly that – promoting awareness of Bloomsbury’s bananas, when I have the free time to do so.
This article appeared in the Digestive 4
Cover image by Alicja from Pixabay
Featured image by Chiquita Brands International via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
