The food chain is almost broken. Who will reforge the links of trust?
Published in The Observer, 5 June 2011
Our faith in the modern food system is touching. When a bag of salad leaves reads: "Washed and ready to eat", most people will consume the contents without a second thought.
We assume that the leaves were grown safely, picked hygienically, then broken up, washed, dried and bagged in a factory so meticulously clean that we don't even need to rinse them under the kitchen tap.
And why shouldn't we? On the face of it, our food has never been safer. Growers, farmers and food processors all over the world are knee-deep in regulations and protocols imposed by national and international food safety bodies and a handful of ever-more powerful and demanding retailers. The European Food Safety Authority tells us that it is on the case from "field to fork" and boasts about its "rapid alert" system. In the UK, when a food scare hits the headlines, a spokesperson for the Food Standards Agency will reliably pop up with soothing words that play down risk.
On the odd occasion when our normally laid-back trust might flip into panic, as is the case with salads following the new E coli outbreak in Germany, we can buy into the comforting notion that the transnational public health establishment is dedicated to tracking down the source of a rogue problem. Our shiny, clean, state-of-the-art food system is not called into question.
It should be. The white-coated, hair-netted, thoroughly scrubbed-up and hosed-down food safety establishment talks a language of "bio-security", "hazard analysis" and "critical control points", but the truth is that the food industry is largely self-regulating. The paraphernalia of modern food safety has more to do with corporate convenience and the establishment of a paper trail to demonstrate "due diligence" in the event of a problem than guaranteeing public health. Tick-lists, paperwork and audits abound. These bureaucratic processes are predicated on the questionable assumption that when people say they did something, such as testing the microbiological quality of salad washing water regularly or halting pesticide treatments two weeks before harvest, they actually did so.
With food scandals now arriving in a steady stream, we need to understand that by its very nature, our industrialised, globalised food system begets public health problems. It is geared to churning out vast volumes of food and raising productivity, but at the lowest cost. So farmers and growers are pushed to make savings by cutting corners and adopting intensive practices, which open up unprecedented risks that are graver all the time: everything from toxins from GM crops turning up in foetal blood, through sickly, cloned calves dying soon after birth, to the creation of more virulent superbugs.
The emergence last week of a new strain of MRSA in British cows, resistant to key groups of antibiotics, is a case in point. The root cause here is almost certainly routine use of antibiotics on intensive dairy farms. These are being used as a hi-tech "fix" in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep a lid on mastitis, one of the diseases endemic to factory farming. But when the supermarkets pay dairy farmers less than the cost of production, what else can we expect?
Modern food production units – be they US-style beef feedlots or European glasshouse and polytunnel "hubs" that are the size of a small town – are of such a scale that they amplify the impact of all the public health time bombs that our industrial food systems cooks up. If water polluted with potentially deadly food poisoning bacterium such as E coli should ever contaminate a crop of cucumbers, hope and pray that it happens in some isolated farm, cut off from global trade routes, not, for instance, in the Dutch greenhouses that provide a third of the world's supply. A small outfit producing a contaminated product will affect only small numbers of people; a giant one doing the same will hurt large numbers.
Russia's ban on fruit and vegetables from the EU has been denounced as politically motivated and disproportionate. But globalised food distribution and retailing very efficiently delivers major public health problems across national boundaries in hours, without us booking a home-delivery time slot and before the food police are any the wiser. Earlier this year, dioxin-contaminated eggs, also from Germany, were sent to Holland for processing, dispatched to two UK companies that manufactured processed foods and then distributed throughout the UK by major supermarkets. By the time all the links in the chain spanning three countries were established, the UK Food Standards Agency acknowledged that the majority of affected products would have been sold and eaten. Russia may well be grabbing a trade advantage, but if you were a Russian citizen and got E coli poisoning from eating salads imported from an already affected region, you'd want to know why your government hadn't been protecting you.
The UK's worst E coli outbreak to date, in Lanarkshire in 1996, killed 21 people. The source – a small butcher's shop where there was cross-contamination between raw and ready-to-eat meats – was fairly quickly identified because the cases were localized. By contrast, although the current outbreak of E coli appears to affect people in northern Germany, or those who have been there, the source of the poisoning is shrouded in mystery. The key difference here is that the Lanarkshire people were eating local meat. In Germany, they may have been eating salads that came from hundreds of miles away, making it much harder to pinpoint the source.
Whether it's E coli or something else, repeat food scandals are here to stay until we accept that, as Oxfam now puts it, the global food system is "broken" and increasingly dysfunctional – in the case of food safety, dangerously so. Institutionalized risk-taking is endemic. The food safety authorities just live with it. An alarming 75% of British poultry, for example, is contaminated at point of sale with campylobacter, a food-poisoning bug that, in the worst scenario, can kill you. We are told to cook chicken thoroughly to kill it off, wash our salads (although we now know that E coli isn't reliably killed off even by chlorinated water) and not fret about the MRSA incubating down on the farm, because pasteurization kills it. So that's all right then. Panic over.
But if we want our food to be truly safe, we must recognize that this can only be delivered by a radically different model of food and agriculture, one that is based on the largely untapped potential of small-scale, much more regional production and food distribution. We need a new system that no longer concentrates power and control of the food chain in the hands of a few global corporations and interest groups, at the expense of everyone else, one that puts diversity at its heart and respects the limits of the natural world, rather than trying to override them. Until then, expect more food scares. It's business as usual.
Meat or veg?
Published in the Grocer 11th February 2011
If the environmental movement wants to be taken seriously by farmers and consumers, it must stop trotting out uncritically its anti-meat, dairy and egg party line and urgently refine its arguments.
At the moment, American voices like that of Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, shape the debate. His attack is crude and generic. Using the worst-case scenarios of the US’s industrial hog “farms” and feedlots, he argues that all livestock foods entail a greater or lesser degree of animal cruelty and contribute to the forthcoming ecological apocalypse. It doesn’t matter if meat, dairy and eggs are free-range, grass-fed, or organic, these are just lesser forms of the same broad-brush evil.
This approach is simplistic and lazy. There is no acknowledgement that UK and European farming is generally smaller-scale and more extensive. Yes, we do have large intensive farms and misguided voices are pushing for even larger ones, but we also have many smaller, more traditional, broadly progressive farms. To lump them in with industrial mega-farms is unfair, what’s more, its reactionary in effect because it polarizes debate when we need productive dialogue. The discussion should not be whether we eat animal products at all, but what sort we eat, and in what quantity.
Part of the problem is that although those evangelizing the anti-meat and dairy gospel talk a language of localism, they hand out a universal prescription for global woes. So because Americans eat grotesque amounts of meat, whole populations elsewhere must become vegan to correct the global imbalance. Using this logic, inhabitants of the lush, green Swiss Alps would be told that dairy is unsustainable and urged to switch to imported lentils, while the milk, meat and blood-consuming Masai tribesmen on arid East African land would be exhorted to live on lettuce.
In the UK, the promise of a sustainable diet based on plant food is cloud cuckoo land stuff. Our land is well-suited to livestock production; vegetables and fruit are never going to be our strongest hand. Moreover, many Britons could benefit nutritionally from eating more, not less, meat, dairy and eggs. Generic attacks on animal foods simply drive consumption of the cheap carbs and sugary processed products that fuel obesity. No wonder rickets is making a come-back. Would-be environmentalists need to re-write their script and take note.
Banana Wars
Published in Observer Food Monthly 13 March 2005
Every day, Dominica's Broadcasting Corporation airs a radio programme exclusively about bananas, drawing an avid audience from all over this tiny Caribbean island to to hear the latest banana news and chat. Although the central motif on Dominica's flag is a cheery-looking parrot, a more apt one would be the small yellow fruit that is the lifeblood of Dominica.
Like the neighbouring islands of St Lucia and St Vincent, also within the Windward group, Dominica throbs to the beat of calypso and the rhythm of banana farming. The island sets its watch and programmes its activities around Tuesdays, when the banana boat sails into Roseau harbour to pick up the island's weekly crop. It is a heartening sight for Dominicans. The boat's arrival means a big cheque, the revenues from which will filter down to them.
The importance of bananas to Dominica cannot be overstated. Sixty cents in every dollar circulating in this fragile island economy are generated by banana production. If people are not actually growing bananas themselves, then their parents, siblings or grandchildren are engaged, directly or indirectly, in the business. The weekly arrival of the banana boat makes everything possible; piggyback exports of coconuts, citrus and passion fruit, and imports of foreign exotics like salt cod, potatoes and butter .
Dominica and the other Windward Islands manage to make a living from bananas – but only just. People are poor by Western standards but they get by, earning enough to pay bills and sometimes, with a lot of hard work and saving, to afford aspirational things like secondary school education for their children. And Dominica is precisely the sort of place that ethically minded British consumers would like to think their bananas came from. They are grown on small family farms, where workers are reasonably remunerated, protected by well-observed labour laws. Though the island is often referred to as 'sleepy', Dominicans have shown themselves to be go-getting, converting three-quarters of their production to Fair Trade.
Appreciating that, post BSE, British consumers are obsessed with the provenance of their food, Dominican banana growers have cut down drastically on the levels of pesticides previously used. Fair Trade has helped them jump off the chemical treadmill and even allowed them to contemplate the possibility of going organic. Now most farms are treated only once or twice a year. Environmental standards have been tightened, too. The run-off from pesticides used to flow into rivers and kill off the crayfish. Now they are reappearing because no farm can be too close to a waterway. The ground lizards are also coming back, now that herbicides are banned. From the premium price generated by the Fair Trade label, farmers pay themselves a bit extra and plough the rest into community projects like installing lighting in the local health centre or putting desks and chairs into the primary school.
But despite all their efforts, Dominica and the other Windward Islands' small, vulnerable banana industry now faces extinction. From January 2006, the world trade rules that govern bananas are to be changed. These rules are complex and still under negotiation but, in a nutshell, the historic preferential access – a quota system – that guaranteed Caribbean bananas a sure market in Britain is to be swept aside. Instead, the Windwards are to be cut adrift and left to float or sink on the waters of free trade. The US, representing the interests of US-owned transnational banana companies like Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte, argued that the protection extended to these ex-colonies was discriminatory. It has browbeaten the European Union since the early Nineties into progressively opening up its market to imports of intensively produced bananas from Latin and Central America, nicknamed 'dollar' bananas because production there is controlled by powerful US companies.
If the proposed tariff-based, 'one-cap-fits-all' market in bananas goes ahead, even the most rabid free marketeer can see that the Windward Islands' banana industry has a problem. Banana production is astonishingly vertical on these hilly little islands. Plots are precipitous, making mechanisation impractical, so everything has to be done by hand. Irrigation is rarely an option so growers rely on rain. Being islands, transport costs to market are necessarily high. Last but not least, they are at the mercy of volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. In just one day in 2004, Hurricane Ivan wiped out banana production on Grenada.
The Windwards cannot possibly compete in a totally free market with intensively grown dollar bananas produced on prairie-like flat plantations offering massive economies of scale. 'Put it this way, a Latin American plantation is bigger than the whole of St Vincent. If this new banana regime goes ahead, we can be reduced to poverty overnight,' explains Lewis Straker, St Vincent's deputy prime minister. The British consumer has a choice, he says. Buy sweet, well-produced Windward bananas from decently paid workers, or bananas from 'multinational corporations reaping profits on the back of slave labour'.
Might Mr Straker possibly be exaggerating to strengthen his political hand? Not excessively, it seems, when you listen to Carlos Arguedas Mora, a dapper Costa Rican whose lively youthfulness is only belied by his silver-streaked hair. The secretary for worker's health and the environment for SITRAP, the Costa Rican plantation workers union, he speaks in a remarkably controlled way about conditions on his country's banana plantations – which supply one in four of the bananas we eat in the UK. So far he has been to jail 22 times for his trade union activities, but this does not discourage him. 'I'm not really afraid of jail any more,' he says.
Carlos carries around a folder documenting the consequences of intensive banana production in his country. 'It was the dream of every young man of my generation to be a banana farmer. Now people only become banana workers when they have no alternative. We have a 108-year history of banana production in Costa Rica but it's not until the last few years that it's really dawned on us how severe the damage is.' On one page of his folder, there is a picture of a baby born without feet and with malformed hands. 'The doctors say that her deformities are the direct result of her parents' and grandparents' contact with chemicals on banana plantations.' On others, there are photos of dead fish found in a river bordering one plantation. On further pages, press cuttings chart a hard-won victory in a successful court case against a major banana company which was forced to pay substantial compensation for a chemical spillage.
In order to supply markets like the UK with cheap bananas, says Carlos, tens of thousands of hectares of primary forest in Costa Rica have been cut down to make way for banana monoculture, making the country more vulnerable to flood damage. 'Twenty to 30 years ago, there was still a huge diversity of fish in rivers and streams that people depended on for food, but now they have completely disappeared. All the rivers that flow from the mountains through the banana plain that stretches from the Panamanian border to the Nicaraguan border arrive at the Caribbean totally polluted, devastating marine life,' Carlos explains. The granular nematicide, spread under banana trees to kill worms, for example, runs into rivers the minute it rains. It is so toxic, it even kills off crocodiles. A typical banana wage in Costa Rica is about £5 for a 10- to 12-hour day. That's below the minimum wage. How can this happen? Carlos refers to the transnational banana companies as 'a state within a state. They have done what the hell they liked and the government has never stopped them violating the laws of the land.'
Selfa Sandoval, a maternal-looking Guatemalan trade union organiser and activist in a coalition of banana workers' unions throughout Latin America, has a similar tale. 'Unless they work on a plantation where the union is active, Guatemalan banana workers earn below the minimum wage for a 12- to 14-hour day, six days a week. Sometimes they also have to get up at three in the morning to get transport to work.' Plantations in Guatemala are so vast that a workforce of 350 people is common. If unionised, she says, they will have some level of protective equipment, such as a mask, when applying pesticides, but not otherwise.
Plantations have regular aerial spraying of pesticides. Where the union is strong, workers must not be in the field when this spraying is taking place but, in non-unionised plantations, people are sprayed while working. 'We have plenty of cases of people eating while spraying is going on. Many male banana workers have become infertile, and allergies and skin diseases are common, yet workers have no choice but to expose themselves to chemicals on a daily basis. We are particularly concerned about women who treat with insecticide the blue plastic bags that are put over the ripening bananas.' She is referring to chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate whose suspected effects on humans include birth defects, nervous system disorders, leukaemia and immune system abnormalities. Last year, a group of Nicaraguan women banana workers made legal history by being awarded the right to compensation for damage done to their health by a particular chemical once used in banana production – chlorpyrifos may be the next one under the spotlight.
In response to the gains won by Selfa and her colleagues, the big banana companies are now moving their operations to Guatemala's Pacific coast, where labour is cheaper because workers are not organised. 'One major banana company uses the threat of abandoning plantations to try to reduce conditions on them. They have warned that if we try to fight back, there will be blood. We have to take that seriously – they mean it,' she says.
Just as there is a world of difference between the production history of the typical Caribbean and Latin American banana, there is also a yawning gulf when it comes to taste. At bustling Kingstown market on St Vincent, I met Nioka Abbott, secretary of the island's Fair Trade committee. Women basically run banana farming on St Vincent. 'When bananas were buoyant, they were known as "green gold" and men controlled the farms. But men can't stand up to pressure and now that bananas are not so profitable, we women run the show. They just get us pregnant and run away.' At the start of the Nineties, the Windwards supplied around two-thirds of the UK's bananas. This has fallen to one in 10 as their market has been whittled away by cheaper Latin American imports.
Nioka showed me what a really delicious banana should look like. Caribbean bananas taste better than dollar bananas because they are less chemical, less plumped up with fertilisers. She peels a perfect specimen. Its skin is deep yellow, almost speckled with little brown sugar spots. Thin and moist, it pulls away easily. The flesh is obligingly fondant within, soft enough to mash for a baby's puree with the lightest pressure. Bite into it, the texture is positively silky and the flavour distinctly fruity, a far cry from the floury, thick-skinned specimens we get in the UK. This, she says, is because all that British supermarket chains really care about – with the exception of Waitrose – is a steady supply and a low price. The bananas we are sold have that farinaceous texture and neutral flavour because they have not been transported on the bunch, ripened instead with ethylene gas so their starch has not broken down into sugar.
Back in the Sixties, the Windward Isles exported their bananas, just as they grow, on the mother stem. It enabled them to ripen more naturally. Then the supermarkets started demanding them in clusters and bagged to cut down on labour costs in Britain. But it is the growers who foot the bill for that packaging. Banana farmers on St Vincent told me, for instance, that they pay seven cents for each bag they are required to use by Asda. Little costs like these erode their precarious incomes.
All Windward Island banana growers – like their counterparts around the globe – work to a common specification for bananas, drawn up to reflect our supermarkets' idea of the perfect banana; a visually flawless, under-ripe fruit of uniform length and breadth. Flick through the 'Banana Defects Manual' and you see that most of the requirements are purely to do with appearance. Neither taste nor nutrient levels are mentioned. On a cluster of six or seven bananas, growers are allowed only the equivalent of one shirt button-sized blemish and no more than two blemished bunches per 15kg box. More than that and the whole lot will be rejected. The supermarkets demand that all bananas must be dipped in fungicide. Latest UK government tests show that 59 per cent of the bananas we eat have residues of imazalil, the most commonly used fungicide for bananas. The US Environmental Protection Agency classes it as 'likely to be carcinogenic in humans'.
That does not appear to concern UK supermarket buyers because bananas are their single most profitable line or because they perceive the residues to be insignificant. You might not think that could be the case, since supermarkets price cut ruthlessly on bananas, but here again it is the growers who stump up for our bargains. Banana Link, a Norwich-based NGO campaigning for a sustainable and fair banana trade, says that, following a banana price war started by Asda in 2002, one banana importer saw the price it was paid for a box of bananas slashed from £11 at the end of 2001 to around £7.75 by the summer of 2003 as its supermarket buyer sought to preserve profit margins while simultaneously cutting the price to its own customers.
For Windward growers, with their higher productions costs, the UK supermarkets' continual downward pressure on price is hard to bear, but the big chains hold all the cards. 'It's easier for supermarket buyers to make their 32 per cent margin on Latin American bananas. They even tell us that, by stocking our bananas, we are costing them money,' says Dr Errol Reid, from the St Lucia-based Windward Islands Banana Development and Export Company. The threat of being dumped by the supermarkets is omnipresent, but as one farmer put it; 'They have us at ransom.' If Tesco pulled out of Dominica, or Sainsbury's from St Lucia, or Asda from St Vincent then these economies could collapse. But although the Windwards rely on supermarkets, they don't trust them. 'We do not like "belonging" to supermarkets, or having all our eggs in one basket,' they explained. And they are counting on the traditional allegiance of British consumers to Caribbean bananas to prevent the supermarkets ditching them for the more lucrative option.
'Bananas is a handed-down thing. Bananas is about us and our life. Without bananas, we'd be better off dead,' says Edmond Henderson, wiping the sweat from his brow. His small, vertiginous banana farm, fringed with avocado and palm trees, is at Marigot on Dominica. Today is his busiest time – the fortnightly harvesting – when he is helped out by his wife, Joyciema, sister-in-law, Petra and another local man, drafted in to help for the day. That is the great thing about bananas, the steady fortnightly income. 'Bananas here are like a chain. We use the money to send our kids to school, to buy uniforms and books ... everything is supported by bananas,' he explains. In the last 10 years, as the European banana market has been altered to give less protection to Caribbean growers, he has seen 5,000 people emigrate from Marigot alone. Most head for Guadeloupe where wages are higher because it is a department of France. Others try to get jobs in tourism on islands like Antigua. They take whatever they can get. Beggars can't be choosers. Meanwhile on St Vincent, some growers are diversifying into cannabis production.
'I was born here. I have a love for bananas and I don't want to go but, in truth, I don't think I would have survived until now if it wasn't for Fair Trade. God bless Fair Trade,' says Edmond. His daughters, Lauraine and Lesha, share his passion. As children they both begged to be given their own tiny plots to cultivate and would like to continue in the banana industry. Lauren wants to go to university to study soil science so she can become an even better grower, but where is the money to come from? Banks are not keen to lend to Caribbean banana growers any more. Recognising the threat that hangs over them, the banks view loans to them as too risky.
Further around the island at Salybia, the Bruney family don't even have the luxury of dreaming about loans. They are part of a 3,500-strong population of Caribs, the last remaining descendants of this ancient people that have survived in the Caribbean. Their land is held in common, so they have nothing to use as loan security, even supposing they could manage to pay one back. Suckey Bruney and his wife, Estiem, use bananas to support their household – an extended family of 12 living in three rooms. What would they do if the banana boat stopped picking up? Suckey just raises his eyes upwards. He doesn't even want to think about it. Looking on the bright side, the Caribs have been diversifying into crafts. But baskets and ornamental calabashes can't put food in the mouths of 12 people. And who would buy them anyway? Although extraordinarily green and beautiful, Dominica lacks an international airport and those holiday-brochure golden, sandy beaches.
The majority of banana growers in the Windward Islands are not native people like the Bruneys, but the descendants of slaves, brutally uprooted from Africa by their colonial masters then put to work growing a series of profitable crops. In the early Fifties, when the old monoculture of sugar production became unprofitable, the Windward Islands were encouraged by the former colonial power – Britain – to switch to bananas. They did so in the belief that they could rely on the market in the UK.
Now, undercut on price by floods of inferior-tasting, unethically produced supplies and squeezed by supermarkets, they are waiting to see if the British government will stand up for Caribbean bananas. They know that no other government in the EU will. Otherwise, the only ray of hope for these fragile economies is that British consumers are still prepared to demonstrate loyalty to their bananas, to seek them out, to shame retailers into stocking them and even to pay a bit more for them. If not because they still have some lingering historical sense of obligation to the people in their former colonies, then simply because they can enjoy a sweeter fruit with a palatable pedigree. 'A story filtered back to us about a British pensioner with very little money paying more for our bananas just to support us ... Is it true that there are people in Britain who will make sacrifices like this,' a group of Dominican growers ask. I nod affirmatively. They smile. 'That is most encouraging for us.'
When pineapples are not the sweetest fruit
Published in Observer Food Monthly 19 November 2006
As little as 10 years ago, you took a risk when you bought a pineapple. The fruits that made it to the UK - a variety of pineapple known as the Smooth Cayenne - were scarily spiky, green on the outside and, more often than not, off-puttingly sour and fibrous within. Then in 1996, the Del Monte 'Gold' pineapple hit our shelves, the first of a new type of low-acid pineapple bred in Hawaii.
The chunky new pineapple took its name from its skin tone, more yellowy-gold than green. It had a slightly softer, less daunting exterior and less fibrous, more reliably juicy flesh in which its promoters found notes of coconut, even mango and passion fruit. But the key trait of this new type of pineapple was that it was twice as sweet as the hit-and-miss pineapples we had known. Almost overnight, the Del Monte Gold took the market by storm, rapidly becoming the world's bestselling pineapple variety, and delivering natural levels of sweetness in the mouth, up until then only found in sugary tinned pineapple.
Nutritionally it was all good news too. This toothsome pineapple contained four times more vitamin C than the old green variety. Nutritionists clucked with approval, recommending it not only as a rich source of vitamins and micronutrients, but also for its bromelain enzymes, known to promote healing and reduce inflammation. Consumers were understandably thrilled to be able to buy into the pleasurably therapeutic properties of this exotic super fruit for pounds 1.80 a throw, or even less. Consumption rocketed, and the Del Monte Gold, either whole, or more often cubed in ready-prepared fruit salads, rapidly became a fixture in the shopping basket of the healthy eater.
Seeing the profit potential for its winning pineapple, Del Monte tried to keep the market to itself. But the new hybrid pineapple had been developed at the Pineapple Research Institute in Hawaii in the 1970s and other fruit companies with research interests in this institute were adamant that the golden pineapple was not exclusive to Del Monte. Dole, a major player on the global fruit scene, brought out the Gold MD-2. The smaller Maui Pineapple Company launched a similar fruit, which it dubbed Hawaiian Gold.
Del Monte began legal action to stop its rivals, but failed. The rivals argued successfully that Del Monte's attempts to patent the golden pineapple were just a way to muscle its competitors out of the market. Since then, all the major global fruit companies have got in on the act. Bonita now markets its 'Ultra Sweet' pineapple and Chiquita sells a 'Gold Extra Sweet' pineapple. Golden pineapples have transformed eating habits throughout the world. In the UK, pineapple consumption has doubled in 10 years.
In the fiercely competitive global fruit market, major players aim to maximise profits by growing fruit in countries where production costs are as low as possible. Earlier this year, Del Monte made this explicit when it announced that it was pulling out of its pineapple operations in Hawaii because its pineapples could be 'grown for less in other parts of the world'. This is why, if there is a pineapple sitting in your fruit bowl today, there's a high chance that it comes from Costa Rica.
Why Costa Rica? Ten years ago, Costa Rica's pineapples were grown mainly for home consumption; now it has rocketed to the world's number-one producer of fresh pineapple, knocking back the Ivory Coast into second place. Costa Rica is sometimes referred to as the Switzerland of Latin America because it is stable and democratic. With little in the way of natural wealth, it has concentrated on tourism and agriculture and is keen to welcome foreign investment. Big fruit corporations already have considerable banana-growing interests in the country but, in recent years, bananas have not proven so profitable. Thanks to ruthless price wars between retailers, their value has plummeted.
Costa Rica also happens to have the hot, wet climate that is perfect for pineapple, a crop that dangles the prospect of tantalising profit margins for growers, distributors and retailers. The economic argument for converting existing banana plantations into pineapple plantations, or finding fresh, new land for pineapples, is very strong, and the push is on to expand production in the south and Atlantic areas of the country. The value of pineapple exports from Costa Rica is approaching that of coffee, formerly the country's leading export crop.
Costa Rica is a country whose abundant wildlife and breathtaking natural environment have made it a magnet for tourists from all over the world. If you were on holiday in Costa Rica, for a mere $15, you might very well be interested in taking one of the popular 'pineapple tours' laid on by pineapple companies to learn more about how the fruit is produced. On such guided tours, tourists can marvel at the wonderful world of modern pineapple cultivation and sample sweet, golden fruits fresh from the field.
But earlier this month, a fact-finding mission made up of Costa Rican trade unionists, representatives from the non-governmental organisation Banana Link (which campaigns for a fair and sustainable fruit trade) and the GMB trade union carried out their own independent tour of one particular plantation - the Pinafruit SA plantation in Limon province on Costa Rica's Atlantic coast. The plantation is owned by a Costa Rican company, Grupo Acon and grows golden pineapples for several major fruit importers, as well as Tesco and Waitrose. The delegation came back with a disturbing story, direct from the mouths of the workers. It's a story that sours the sweet taste of the golden pineapple and the GMB account supports independent reports that have been trickling out of Costa Rica that the pineapple boom is predicated on environmental damage and the exploitation of workers.
'The conditions we witnessed were dreadful,' says Bert Schouwenburg, a full-time official for the GMB in London. 'If you had any empathy for the people who grow and pick the pineapples, you just wouldn't grow pineapples this way. The workers were being used like donkeys, with no thought for the damage this back-breaking work does to their health. I was appalled at what I saw and what I learned from talking to workers. It was like seeing Dickensian conditions, only with sunshine.'
Another delegation member, Cath Murphy, a GMB shop steward from Scotland, was so upset by what she saw on the plantation that she cried at night when she got back home. 'I couldn't stop thinking about the faces of these young men, still only in their teens and twenties, but with a dullness and hollowness in their eyes. They looked totally exhausted. The plantations are so massive that they have to wake up about three am to walk to work for a five or six am start. They get paid for an eight-hour day, but they usually have to work for more like 11 or 12 hours to meet the targets. Then they have to walk home again. Most do not arrive back until at least eight in the evening. They only get 30 minutes break each day and there is no protection from the sun and the rain. We saw a group huddling under a trailer full of pineapple plants just to get some shelter while eating their packed lunch. There is the odd tin hut that passes for a toilet, but it is a very long walk to get to one. The one we saw had no water, no soap, no toilet paper, no washbasin.
The conditions were really bad. The boys told us that if they complain, the managers send out the police to check their papers. Many of the Nicaraguan workers are poorly educated and don't know how to get the right work documents, so rather than get into trouble with the police, they say nothing.'
The delegation brought back a letter to British pineapple consumers from a group of Nicaraguan migrant workers (who make up the bulk of the country's fruit workforce) on the Pinafruit plantation. In it they highlight their working conditions and ask for better treatment. What follows is a summary:
'Friends, brothers and sisters who consume these products, please help us! Our work generates big profits for the businessmen who are raking it in every day while subjecting us to poverty, anxiety and despair ... We work in sub-human conditions working very long and exhausting days ... There is no freedom of association. Those who join the union are treated like terrorists. We are paid on a piece-rate basis. We have to plant 5,000 pineapple plants a day to make the slightly better rate of 2.15 colones per plant (about pounds 4.50 a day or a penny for every five plants) ... To plant at this rate we have to sacrifice our own health because we are in constant contact with chemicals and have to work in the direct sun and rain bent over all day ... If you don't manage to plant out 5,000 you get money 'docked' from your pay ... Wages do not take into account inflation. [Inflation in Costa Rica has gone up 200 per cent since 1994 but wages have stayed the same.] Even when the fields haven't been cultivated for over a year and are full of weeds, or the soil is rock hard, we get disciplined or sacked if we are not meeting the company's productivity targets.'
Commenting on these allegations Tesco claims it is 'committed to ensuring all of its suppliers work to the highest employment and environmental standards. To this end, we work with our suppliers to help them monitor their supply chain, we carry out announced and unannounced audits over and above legal requirements and take immediate action to rectify any issues that can be improved.
'We have already searched through a sample of wage records and audit reports and from this information we can find no evidence to substantiate these allegations, however, we do take them extremely seriously and have already started further detailed investigations on the ground.We will also be contacting Banana Link to see if they can give us any more information to help with the inquiry.'
Waitrose points out that it is committed to responsible sourcing and high standards of worker welfare. 'Pinafruit has EurepGAP accreditation - an international accreditation that governs good agricultural practice, including worker hygiene and safety. To achieve this accreditation toilets must be located no more than 500 metres away from workers.This was consistent with what our supplier found during an unannounced visit to the plantation [earlier this month].'
During this visit, Waitrose says its supplier also found that 'each worker is entitled to one hour for lunch. But some choose to work longer hours if they wish to earn more. Workers are not disciplined or sacked for work rates below 5,000 plants a day; they are paid according to their productivity. Workers may work under very light rains which are typical of this climate, but as soon as rain becomes too intensive, they are stopped from working.
The vast majority of workers are members of unions or worker associations. Our suppliers found that 408 workers out of 458 are members of a union.' Waitrose has arranged for a full independent audit to take place 'very shortly'.
We have also put the allegations to the owners of Pinafruit, Acon, but have not had a response. It would be comforting to think that the grievances listed by these Nicaraguan workers were confined to one rogue plantation, but people who know the Costa Rican fruit industry insist otherwise. 'This is typical of the scandalous near-slavery conditions endured by the workers on whom the new Costa Rican pineapple boom depends,' claims Alistair Smith, international coordinator of Banana Link. 'Just like in the banana industry, pineapple plantation owners have screwed down wages and benefits to lower than any acceptable minimum on the backs of mainly Nicaraguan migrant workers trying to escape their country's grinding poverty.'
A chorus of organisations in Costa Rica itself is now blowing the whistle on the country's pineapple miracle. According to Carlos Arguedas, health and environment officer for the Union of Agricultural Plantation Workers, Sitrap (Sindicato de Trabajadores de Plantaciones Agricolas), 'they bring jobs but at a high price. The pineapple companies do not respect labour rights, workers or the environment. Animals are dying, soil is being degraded and the health of the population is starting to be seriously affected. These pineapple monocultures are just grey-green deserts.'
As anyone who has ever carried a viciously spiky pineapple home from the shops can testify, pineapples are not an easy fruit to handle. Grown on a kitchen garden, or even on a modest commercial scale, there is nothing inherently bad about pineapples as a crop. But when cultivated on an industrial scale, they are arduous to grow and punishing to handle. The biggest plantations of pineapples in Costa Rica cover an almost unimaginable expanse, equivalent to more than 1,800 football pitches. In order to make way for this intensive cultivation, the land is cleared of all other trees or vegetation that might get in the way of crop-spraying, rapid planting and picking. Unlike banana plantations, where workers have some shade and cover from overhead banana plant leaves, pineapple pickers and planters are exposed to the elements, most of the time bent double or crouched over the low, spiky pineapple plants.
Monocultures of pineapples on the Costa Rican scale are a honeypot for pests and diseases and so the fruits have to be grown with substantial inputs of pesticides, either applied by knapsack sprayers on the backs of workers, or dispensed by long-armed truck sprayers. Workers should be given protective clothing, but reports suggest that this is a rarity. In practice, working with no shelter under the full glare of the sweltering sun in temperatures that regularly hit 35C at midday, workers say that the wearing of protective clothing becomes unbearable.
One of the most visible health effects of working continuously with jaggy, pesticide-soaked plants is that the planter's fingernails become deformed and eventually fall out, claims Cath Murphy. 'The boys showed me their fingers and their nails were all brown, unusually thick and infected. They told me that their nails drop off all the time. I only saw one boy wearing rubber gloves.'
Rotten nails may be the least of their worries. 'Respiratory diseases, asthma, babies born with defects, spontaneous abortion and male sterility are higher in the pineapple zone than anywhere in Costa Rica, all health problems linked to pesticide poisoning,' says Linda Craig, director of the UK Pesticides Action Network. Since the workforce is casual, and often made up of migrant workers, they can easily be dismissed if they fall ill.
Waitrose points out that the EurepGAP accreditation, which this plantation has, emphasises good agricultural practice, including worker hygiene and safety, and a stringent requirement is the use of protective clothing by workers.
The Foro Emaus, a Costa Rican umbrella group for some 25 environmental organisations, has been campaigning for the last three years to stop the expansion of pineapple cultivation. It blames the chemicals used in pineapple plantations for contaminating the water and soil. It says that rivers and wells are choking because of sedimentation from pineapple cultivation. Photos of the river delta in Costa Rica's Tortuguero National Park - a nesting spot for rare green turtles - have shown that it is filling with sediment that many believe comes from pineapple plantations.
Unlike its traditional coffee production, which is primarily Costa Rican-owned, the pineapple business is overwhelmingly controlled by foreign corporations.
'The expansion of pineapple growing is largely in a few hands and most of them are not Costa Rican,' says Guillermo Acuna Gonzalez, of Foro Emaus. The worry is that when the current pineapple boom runs out of steam - in as little as four or five years according to some business predictions - Costa Rica will be left to pick up the social and environmental damage left in its wake.
A growing number of Costa Ricans are further dismayed by the fact that the uncontrolled push to get more and more land under cultivation has seen swathes of tropical forest that supported a rich diversity of wildlife turned over to pineapples. This deforestation is not sanctioned by Costa Rican law, but environmentalists allege that certain companies have nevertheless cut down primary forest, often by leasing land in the forest reserves of indigenous people. Sometimes overnight, all trees and vegetation have been mysteriously uprooted to make way for furrowed lines of pineapple plants which rapidly establish themselves in the hot, damp conditions.
Another Costa Rican environmental organisation, the Costa Rican Popular Front against Pollution - an alliance of trade unions, church groups and non-governmental groups - has grown up to oppose the expansion in the Costa Rican Buenos Aires county of Pindeco, a subsidiary of Del Monte. This company produces at least 50 per cent of Costa Rica's pineapples, supplying Asda in the UK, and other non-supermarket customers. Del Monte acknowledges that it has a profound responsibility to practise exemplary corporate stewardship. 'We uphold this duty by being deeply committed to protecting and preserving the natural environment, providing our customers with high-quality, safe produce and establishing a workplace where employees around the world can work in secure and healthy conditions,' it says. But the Popular Front insists that Del Monte does not honour this promise.
The Popular Front has also championed the cause of livestock farmers who are adamant that pineapple plantations are harming their livelihood and causing pestilence. In recent years, cattlemen in the Buenos Aires area have been plagued by clouds of blood-sucking flies - Stomoxys calcitrans - that cause their cattle to lose their appetite and therefore lose weight. They blame the pineapple plantations, saying that the flies breed in rotting piles of leaves left after the fruit is plucked. Since these flies have become a public issue, wholesale burning of harvested fields has become the more common way to clear plantations, a practice condemned by environmentalists.
What price the golden pineapple when we learn more about how it is produced? How can the ethical consumer avoid being complicit in suffering at the other side of the world? Buying an organic pineapple at least guarantees that workers have not had their health compromised by pesticides. A Fairtrade pineapple brings with it the reassurance of a better wage. But it doesn't help the people, like the young Nicaraguan men at Pinafruit, who grow all our other pineapples.
The workers at Pinafruit are not asking for a consumer boycott. They need the work, and are simply asking for that work to be made fair and equitable. 'We are not against exports but we are against exploitation,' they say. 'We want wages that are based on the actual cost of living, reasonable working hours, and freedom of association. We demand our rights as human beings. We want you to give us your hand.'
Their plea to the outside world must make us wonder just how typical their experience is. How many other faceless workers, growing tropical crops for our tables in faraway countries, could write us a similar letter? This is a question that can only be answered by the companies who import and sell our fruit. And the onus is on them to make sure that they have a genuinely good story to tell.
The girls' bloodless revolution
Published in the Independent 16 January 1993
When my prospective au pair phoned to tell me she was a vegetarian, and asked if this would be a problem, I said categorically that it would not. We were, I explained, a household that inclined in that direction anyway. Red meat we ate occasionally, poultry or fish once or twice a week - a vegetarian would not make much difference. Famous last words.
I had always been censoriously unsympathetic to friends who complained about their teenagers (invariably daughters) who had suddenly become vegetarian. 'All they do is spend even longer in the bathroom messing about with stuff from the Body Shop, only emerging to give you lectures on animal welfare,' said one friend.
When she had stopped ranting like an old reactionary, we established that, however wearing, her daughter did have some legitimate concerns about the miserable conditions in which many animals are reared for the table, which we indeed shared. The difficulty came not with the logic of the argument, but with the consequences. In other words, finding things that she would eat.
'The main problem with Kate becoming a vegetarian is that she doesn't really like vegetables,' my friend moaned. Kate, it appeared, was more anti-things than pro-things in principle - the prerogative of all teenagers. But I had to admit that it must make cooking difficult.
My sister confirmed that the young vegetarian was a rapidly growing phenomenon, saying she had been told that they account for 14 per cent of the 15-17 age group. But she insisted it was more like 90 per cent of girls, based on her empirical observations of daughters of friends and colleagues, plus the series of au pairs who had arrived from various European countries in the course of 10 years.
'The only things you can be absolutely sure that they will eat are baked potatoes, digestive biscuits and Haagen-Dazs ice cream. The German ones eat endless bowls of breakfast cereals and muesli at all hours of the day and night,' she informed me. But the worst of all were what she called 'Glaswegian vegetarians' after our home town. They lived on Coke, Mars bars and chips.
So when Rosie, our vegetarian au pair, arrived to live with us for three months, I was absolutely determined that we would rise to the occasion. This was going to be an opportunity, not a limitation. We would all, children included, eat vegetarian food. I could not bear the prospect of cooking two different meals, still less of offering, as an alternative when we ate meat, those ghastly textured vegetable-protein sausages and rissoles promoted by veggie idols such as Linda McCartney. We would, instead, eat only imaginative and stimulating meatless meals - and love it.
It all went brilliantly at the beginning. For the first 10 days, we ate two totally meat-free meals a day - felafels and tahini sauce, pasta in all forms, vegetable crudites with crusty breads of all kinds, chick-pea stews, millet and vegetable galettes, creamy potato pie, gratin dauphinois, herby omelettes, home-made pizza, mountains of green salad, lentil curries, spiced rice, stir-fried noodles . . . no one complained. The children revelled in the permanent revolution of dishes set before them. Rosie, fortunately, was not a vegetarian of the Glaswegian variety, being open-minded and fairly adventurous. What was more, she would eat fish. The only no-go vegetable was spinach, which she detested. Thus I found myself in the ironic position of dispensing little lectures on folic acid and its benefits for women's reproductive health.
So far so good . . . until my energy ran out. The first hassle was less the flow of ideas than the time factor. It all took ages. People got fed up with bread and cheese and fruit, especially in winter. Baked potatoes became boring too, but everything else took time and effort. Searching for inspiration, I asked Rosie what she ate at home. We established that soup in all forms was a winner. But what about the stock? No quick boil-up of the remains of a chicken was permitted. Not even a ham bone or bacon trimming to flavour the lentil. She suggested stock cubes, but here I was the purist. How could those combinations of hydrolysed vegetable protein, salt and flavourings ever fit into any idea of healthy or wholesome eating? I was scandalised. Stock cubes in my book are on a par with Camp coffee.
The stock debate opened up a gulf between me, as a vaguely demi-vegetarian food lover, and the true vegetarian. I had low tolerance for convenience foods such as ready-made pizza bases, cook-chill cauliflower cheese, nut cutlets and others of that ilk. Principled vegetarians, on the other hand, like them because they do not cause the demise of a living thing . . . whether or not they taste good.
Thus the ritual of making proper vegetable stock began, and Rosie became a willing learner. But there were drawbacks: a kitchen perpetually running with condensation and a house that took on that soupy smell you find in wholefood cafes. But the worst thing was the sheer bulk of supplies that had to be lugged back from the shops. No high energy, slim-line steaks or chicken escalopes. In their place, sackloads of potatoes, stacks of carrots, what seemed like hundredweights of garlic and onions, half a bakery a day. I took to buying things like rice in bulk, stocking up in frontiersman spirit with red beans and molasses. And still we were always running out.
I began to see the market through Rosie's eyes. Walking past those stands with rabbits hung by their hind legs, aged cocks with dangling necks, dark red ox tongue and shuddering calves liver obviously upset her. She would avert her eyes and look away, like a sensitive bystander trying to ignore a public execution. Fish, too, was a delicate matter. Fine if it was a nice white fillet; less so if it was a slippery little squid with one baleful eye, a twitching lobster, or a primordial looking oyster. I realised how I had never really understood the squeamishness that grips many vegetarians. Food lovers take pleasure in the tactile sensations of handling and preparing food. Scaling or gutting a fish is merely part of the job, a chance even to examine the provenance of what you are preparing. To vegetarians, such activities are as repugnant as serving up a newborn baby for ritual slaughter.
Towards the end of the second month, it was the children who began to rebel. 'Why don't we ever get lamb chops any more?' became the chorus. 'Give us meat with bones in,' they demanded. So, when Rosie was away in Paris, I shot out and bought meat. We salivated over roast duck. The kids demolished potatoes fried in goose fat. I made a huge beef stew with red wine and olives . . . the sort of gutsy peasant food I had rarely made before, but suddenly craved.
When we finally waved Rosie goodbye on the plane at the end of her stay with us, there was no problem deciding what we might eat that night. But her stay has subtly changed the way we eat now. Bacon, a foodstuff which I always thought I loved, suddenly lost its appeal. Even free-range, antibiotic-free and dry cured . . . it suddenly seemed like the salty piece of unappealing fat that vegetarians abhor. We had all become aware of fat and grease. I cooked some better-than-average sausages, and no one wanted to eat them.
Overall, I reached one global conclusion. Demi-vegetarian leanings do not necessarily escalate into full-blown vegetarianism. I love good meatless food - preferably not cooked by vegetarians - but I would be terribly sad never to eat a really good stew, roast pheasant, Peking duck or tender gigot of lamb again. It took a vegetarian to show me that, for which I am eternally grateful.
