The banana industry in North America is dominated by players established in the early 20th centuryand century, whose founding business model was based on paying nothing for land (often through political machinations) and spending paltry sums on labor, with the goal of producing fruit which would sell so cheaply that they would become more popular than apples.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
To this day, we Canadians each eat 33 pounds of bananas a year, a good lead over the poor second apple at 22 pounds.
Bananas are also the cheapest fruit in our basket at 74¢/lb in February, about a third of the price of apples. The notion of cheap bananas is so entrenched in North American consumer culture that retailers often use them to cultivate their stores’ price perception. While the price of other goods has risen over the years, the banana seems stuck in a time capsule: the average retail price of bananas in 1995 was 59¢/lb: in 2022 dollars, that would be $1/ lbs.
The world doesn’t need another banana company to satisfy the demand for cheap fruit. Instead, Equifruit emphasizes a fairer distribution of value along the supply chain, especially at the origin, where small-scale producers and plantation workers live precariously in generational poverty. Our main challenge is to change mentalities about bananas; get Canadians thinking about where this fruit is grown, by whom and under what conditions. Although more and more retailers and consumers are choosing Equifruit products, Fairtrade bananas have less than 2% market share in Canada: what about the remaining 98%?
And so here is the sad truth: banana production does not magically defy inflationary trends. What corners can be cut most easily to satisfy our need for cheap bananas?
There are people, even children, who bridge the gap between these very low retail prices and the sustainable cost of production, who subsidize our favorite fruit with their exploited labor and abusive working conditions:
— The US Department of Labor includes bananas in its 2020 list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor;
— A 2021 report on working conditions in the Guatemalan banana industry found that 85% of production takes place on non-union plantations supplying the main banana companies, where workers work an average of 68 hours per week for 1, US$05/hour. Not just in front of the computer: Hours and hours of strenuous physical labor, where workers report high levels of verbal and sexual harassment, with few workplace safety precautions. About 40% of the bananas we import into Canada come from Guatemala.
Instead of condemning these appalling supply chain practices, we celebrate the race to the bottom.
In Western Canada, for example, a grocery chain has signs above its banana section that say, ” Always lowest guaranteed. We can’t guarantee your kids won’t monkey around… but we can guarantee we have the lowest price on bananas (“Always the lowest price, guaranteed. We can’t guarantee your child won’t monkey around…but we can guarantee the lowest price on bananas”). Price/book? 66¢. Another grocery chain, national this time, advertises on huge in-store billboards: Paying too much for bananas is bananas (“Paying too much for bananas is crazy”). Price/book? 56¢.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR
Sign in a grocery store in Western Canada guaranteeing the lowest price for bananas
Bill S-211 seeks to create an obligation for certain federal institutions and private sector entities to report on the measures they are taking to prevent and mitigate the risk of using forced labor or child labor in their supply chains.
Bananas are a product of which it is easy to talk about supply chains: we all consume this raw material, no processing, no complicated recipe. So it would be easy to say “what you see is what you get”.
This is precisely why Equifruit supports Bill S-211, because what we see only tells part of the story. Low prices should be a big red flag, but if these are ignored, a reporting requirement, such as the one proposed in this legislation, is a great starting point for Canadian businesses to dig a little deeper, ask questions and make changes to their supply chains. And hopefully, together, we can ensure that children are not part of these supply chains and can be left to do what children do best: monkey around.