Where Bananas Come From

Everybody loves bananas. A point made in the award-winning Canadian documentary, Banana Split, which followed the banana market from start to finish.

Supermarkets in Canada, which are not very different from those in the US, reported to the filmmakers that bananas are a must-carry produce item. Without them, many customers would pick up and take their business elsewhere.

But the cheery, tasty fruit has a sinister recent past, as highlighted by the latest news about the Chiquita corporation, formerly United Fruit Company, the people who really put the banana in the Banana Republics.

Chiquita is trying to get a lawsuit by indigenous Colombians dismissed, where the plaintiffs are suing for damages for payments of cash and weapons made by a Chiquita subsidiary to Colombian paramilitary groups that massacred peasants and particularly targeted labor leaders in the impoverished country. Chiquita has already admitted to making the payments, but said that they had no choice.

No choice but to pay off paramilitaries who were using their ports and ships to traffick cocaine, as well as murdering people who encouraged their workers to organize for better pay or indigenous leaders fighting for the return of their land.

Our new attorney general, Eric Holder, was Chiquita's lawyer in this matter before taking office. While they have a right to counsel and did, at Holder's urging, come forward to admit their actions, one might still wonder what Holder's role was in the ongoing litigation between Chiquita and the victims of their paramilitary beneficiaries. So what this means for the Obama administration's take on corporate crime is unclear.

Perhaps this is 'backward looking', and there are some who have thrown around Obama's talk of bipartisanship and solution-seeking, always popular with the Beltway punditocracy, to say that bygones should be bygones. After all, Chiquita's going organic and getting into fair trade now. Hmm.

Does that change the fact that, as Perfecto and Vandermeer note in the book Breakfast of Biodiversity, a map of the most fertile land in Central America corresponds almost perfectly to a map of its foreign-owned plantations? Not so much. Does that change the fact that they're trying to avoid paying for the consequences of their corporate past beyond the slap-on-the-wrist, $25 million fine levied by the Justice Department?

Diamonds and fur, luxury items sought after mostly by women, are easy targets for outrage against consumer preferences that can have perverse ethical effects. But the banana bunch sitting in nearly every house that can afford them, like the coltan in our cell phones, gets a pass.

It's hard to face that an ethical marketplace means more than consumers avoiding things many people can't afford anyway. Citizens, not consumers, are what the world needs right now. So with that, let me wish all the Colombian plaintiffs the best of luck in their case.

(Photo credit: dakota duff on Flickr.)