¡Chiquita, Chiquita!

 Hi all –

I recently returned from my first field trip away from the center. We went to the Northeastern edge of the country (close to the Caribbean coast and a few dozen kilomenters from the Nicaraguan border) to a National park called La Tirimbina. Along the way we stopped at a Chiquita banana farm, which this post is dedicated to - I’ll discuss my experience at Tirimbina in a subsequent post.

Before I begin describing what I saw at Chiquita, I just want to forewarn that at the time of this post I’m including information that I have recently learned, but I realize that my opinions and impressions may change as I become more involved in my course work and am exposed to more agricultural systems in Costa Rica, so I may return to this and other topics to include more information and different perspectives. Basically, I’m new to this, people.

Banana farms were very important to the Costa Rican economy (as with other agricultural practices, such as pineapple and coffee farms) during the late 19^th and early 20^th century. However, as I learned quickly, banana farms have a horrible reputation in Costa Rica (and Central America in general) for extreme deforestation, horrifically abusive labor practices and even removing elected officials from the government. The atrocities of the Banana industry in Costa Rica were most famously revealed in ­­­a book in the 1950’s, which I can’t remember right now, but will ask my professor and post back soon.

Chiquita (formerly known as United Fruit Company) is one of the fruit companies (along with Dole, formerly known as Standard Fruit Company) with such a reputation. Recently, many banana farms have been trying to redeem themselves, hence the particular banana farm we visited which offered a talk about the socially and environmentally beneficial practices they were adopting  followed by a tour of the farm by a biologist. Very mushy, rainbows and butterflies type of thing. I will say that both of our tour guides were very honest about the horrible reputations of Chiquita and in a way I admired them as they have sacrificed some good standing in their careers to try to reform a previously corrupt and destructive corporation.

Based on what I saw at the banana farm and learned in my Economics and Ethics of Sustainable Development class (a mouthful I know…) Chiquita was practicing philanthropy, not Corporate responsibility – all of their initiatives such as building forest corridors to connect ecosystems that were  fragmented by banana farms, educating women and only employing workers over 18, were not necessarily company wide practices, and in my opinion, probably a rarity.

Either way, I’ve recently become very fascinated and curious about where food comes from, so it was interesting to see. Below are pictures :

A banana bunch - note that it is known as a banana plant and not a banana tree because bananas are actually herbs (the world's largest). The purple appendage at the bottom is the male component of the plant, which is removed during the harvesting process. There is also a time during the plant's growth where workers have to put in paper inserts to prevent the latex, which naturally leaks from the banana plant, from staining the bananas. Banana cultivation is VERY complicated - there are over twenty intricate steps that must be taken to properly grow and harvest them.  The blue bag over the bananas is composed of 1% insecticide and is designed to protect the bananas from the elements and pests.

Us entering the Chiquita farm. I've forgotten the exact area, but it is several thousand hectares. The passage way we walking through is used by the farmers to move harvested banana bunches out of the farm and to the cleaning/packaging station which was located behind us - essentially the banana bunches were pulled along the spine of the iron over-hanging by a belt attached to a farmer's waist. Farmers also had wooden planks attached to the spine that they would use like a seat and propel themselves through the over pass, which looked really fun (of course, I doubt it compensates for the intensive labor of working 8 hour days on a banana farm). I had a video of the farmers moving through, but the server wouldn't have any of it.

The banana farm from the outside - once you walk into it you can't see anything but banana plants. I'm not sure if you can make it out in the picture but there are different colored strings tied from one plant to another. These have several purposes. The main one being that they indicate which week the plants were planted (there was a very elaborate system of taking the daughter off-shoots of one banana plant and relocating it a few meters away to creates it's own off-shoots. Basically banana plants can continuously just regenerate clones if properly managed for disease etc).