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Washing and spraying Chiquita bananas, Honduras.
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Until the 1960s bananas were grown with relatively little large-scale impact on the natural environment. Forest areas were cleared slowly, there was relatively little use of agrochemicals. Yields were around 20 tonnes per hectare (ha). Today, they are grown highly intensively and yield 50 to 70 tonnes per ha, using high yielding varieties that have low natural resistance to pests and diseases.
Bananas now rival cotton as the biggest consumer of agrochemicals in world agriculture. Banana plantations have been using up to 20 times more pesticides per ha average than in industrialised countries. Many of the chemicals still used are highly toxic. Concerns centre on nematicides such as terbufos (Counter), on aerially applied fungicides such as chlorothalonil (Bravo 500 and 750), as well as on the post-harvest treatments thiabenzadole and imazalil applied in the packing plants.
In mid-June, a coalition of NGOs and trade unions in Costa Rica, Germany and France will launch a national and international campaign to ban the use of paraquat on banana plantations in the region.
The toll on the health of plantation workers and their communities has been
severe(1). Over 60% of reported pesticide poisonings in Costa Rica are from banana plantation workers. In the most notorious case tens of thousands of men and women across the international banana industry have been made sterile by the use in the late 1970s and early 1980s of DBCP (di-bromo-chloro-propane). DBCP was banned in the US in 1977 and dumped in a dozen banana-producing countries. The court case is unfinished and most workers have received only a few hundred dollars compensation, compared to settlements of over $1 million following a serious accident in the Californian factory manufacturing DBCP. Not a cent has been paid by any of the banana companies who used the pesticide, knowing it had been banned in the US.
Change – but only cosmetic?
Plantations are sprayed repeatedly with pesticides, up to 50-60 cycles per season. In the mid-1990s it was estimated by independent scientists that 90% of fungicides sprayed aerially were lost to the
atmosphere(2).
Blue plastic bags impregnated with the insecticide chlorpyriphos (Dursban) – made for the banana market by a Dow subsidiary in Guatemala – are still widely used. Recently, the transnational companies at least have started replacing the all-pervasive blue bags with untreated white plastic bags and a ribbon tied to the
stem which delivers the systemic hit using, they claim, just 1% of the active organophosphate (OP) ingredient of the blue bags. On the less capital-rich plantations the blue bags often end up in water-courses, causing additional pollution.
Despite industry claims, workers rarely receive adequate and appropriate protective clothing, nor are they properly trained to use pesticides safely. Although bananas have thick skins, systemic pesticides which remain inside the flesh and cannot be washed off may turn out to be more damaging to the unwitting consumer.
Up to 25% of the poisoning incidents reported in Costa Rican banana plantations between 1995 and 1997 involved OP-based nematicides terbufos and phenamiphos. These chemicals are used to kill nematodes in the soil (which proliferate in large-scale monocultures where zero rotation is practised). Another 26% of reported incidents involved the herbicide paraquat, one of the so-called ‘dirty dozen’. Fourteen of these incidents involved workers under 18 years old, whom the law says should not be handling these pesticides.
Dangerous production
The firm Agroquimica Industrial Rimac produces agrochemicals at a factory in Tejar del Guarco, just 20 km from the Costa Rican capital San Jose. Six spills in less than three years dangerously exposed dozens of local residents. In April 1995, then again in May and November 1996
terbufos was responsible for 61 people being hospitalised. Nearly half these cases were schoolchildren – three were firefighters. The owners of the factory regarded these poisonings as insignificant, until April 1997 when the Ministry of Health closed down the plant – for the third time. It resumed production in June 1997.
Local residents like Maria Luisa, who lives just 50 metres from the plant, constantly complain of ‘vomiting, headaches and foul odours,’ and want the plant to re-locate to where nobody lives.
Meanwhile, banana plantation workers are demanding to be part of chemical reduction plans which the companies feel are increasingly necessary (see box). The problem is that when the basic right to join an independent trade union is daily violated, the workers demands are not properly heard by their employers. As in any modern industrial-scale agricultural operation, the employees tend to know more about how to rationalise chemical use than the managers sitting in protected office environments.
| The Miami Declaration Following a day of tense negotiations in Miami in early May, the three biggest transnational banana companies received a proposal from the Latin American plantation workers’ unions (COLSIBA) and the IUF to set up a ‘Joint Standing International Labour-Management Committee for the Banana Industry’. Chiquita, Dole, Del Monte and Fyffes are studying the proposal, as well as the workers’ agenda for such a global forum. Given the last hundred years of conflictual labour relations, exploitation, damage to human health and violence across Latin American and Philippino banana exporting zones, the companies’ line that ‘mistakes have been made in the past’, but they now ‘want peace’ is welcome, provided that the words are translated into real improvements on the ground. Declaracion de Miami, 5 May 2000 – available from Banana Link |
References
1. An educational video, ‘Bananas Unpeeled’, available from Banana Link.
2. IUCN report 1995 and Chemielinco, a consultancy company headed by Dr Clemens Ruepert, March1996.
Alistair Smith is the Coordinator of Banana Link, 38 Exchange Street Norwich,
NR2 1AX, UK, blink@gn.apc.org, www.bananalink.org.uk
[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 48, June 2000, page 9]