Bananas Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Bananas Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

In 1870, a strange fruit became a novelty purchase in New York food markets. By 1904, bananas had become the most popular fruit in the United Kingdom, and growing demand for bananas in North America and Europe lay the foundation for profound and ongoing environmental and social impacts in producer countries. Bananas, whether eaten raw (dessert bananas) or cooked (plantains), belong to the genus Musa. Up to a dozen bunches of fruit grow in one year from the single stalk of a fleshy plant often mistaken for a tree. The hundreds of cultivated banana varieties are sterile hybrids derived from two wild species native to Southeast Asia. Lacking viable seed, domesticated Musa are propagated by felling the stem to allow new shoots to grow from the rootstock. This process may go on indefinitely, or shoots can be transplanted to minimize soil depletion and maintain yields.

Bananas are rich in carbohydrates and nutrients (including potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and Vitamin C). A hectare of well-managed plants on rich soil can yield some 16,000 kilograms of fruit per year under hot, wet conditions. Their ease of cultivation, high yield, year-round productivity, and versatility of preparation have long made bananas attractive to people living in the tropics. The crop had spread from South Asia to Africa and the Mediterranean via Arabian land routes by at least 1 c.E., and was known throughout West Africa by the 15th century. In 1516, Spanish friars brought plants from the Canary Islands to the modern-day Dominican Republic. The banana proved so popular among tropical America’s native peoples that its cultivation often diffused faster than the pace of European exploration. In 2006, millions of small farmers in 122 countries grew bananas typically interplanted with other crops on small plots for consumption, as livestock feed, and to supply regional markets. Approximately 80 percent of all bananas grown are eaten in the country of origin, with the highest levels of consumption in Brazil, India, the Philippines, Burundi, Indonesia, and China.

About 20 percent of global production is destined for export. In 2003, Latin American and Caribbean countries, dominated by Ecuador, supplied 80 percent of world exports, with the Philippines, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast accounting for most of the remainder. The top global banana importers were the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Russia. In 2000, total international trade was estimated at $4 billion, and was dominated by a handful of companies.

Production methods for export bananas vary. In Ecuador and the Caribbean, for example, bananas are often contract-farmed by small producers on plots rarely exceeding 50 hectares; planting stock and agrochemicals are provided on credit by a banana company. In Central America, multinationals own or rent vast tracks of land, often at favorable rates. These plantations are effectively run as enclave economies. Laborers are housed and fruit is processed on-site; company-owned facilities are also used in subsequent sea transport, ripening, storage, and distribution. As a result of this vertical integration and economies of scale, most bananas go from harvest to supermarket shelves in less than one month.

Export-bound banana cultivation has an appalling environmental record, which is best exemplified by banana plantations in Central America (which in 2003 supplied 30 percent of global exports). In the late 1800s, United States and British entrepreneurs coerced, threatened, and cajoled nascent republics into ceding vast tracts of land for banana cultivation on prime, but relatively unoccupied, low-lands. As today, field preparation involved clearing primary rainforests on level alluvial soils. As yields decline and/ or pests build up, the land is abandoned and new fields successively cut from forest. This pattern has been responsible for the devastation of massive areas of biodiverse coastal rainforests from Belize to Panama.

Nutrient-demanding banana monocultures are typically maintained with massive inputs of synthetic fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides (pesticides alone can account for up to 35 percent of plantation production costs). Often applied aerially, chemical misuse has damaged plantation-edge forests, and caused the build-up of nematode populations and toxic chemicals in soils. Further, bananas require constant, but not excessive moisture. On plantations, channels are dug to drain water in the rainy season and irrigate in the dry season.

This greatly enhances soil erosion, as well as the delivery of silt and agrochemicals to local waterways. Due to their coastal locations, banana plantations have been blamed for considerable estuarine and coral reef pollution in the Caribbean. In addition, the on-site washing of harvested bananas adds to water demand and contaminated runoff. During the sorting process, up to 35 percent of bananas are rejected (mainly due to blemishes), and may be dumped along with cut stems into nearby streams, where their decomposition starves the water of oxygen; it is estimated the volume of this waste is equal to that of shipped fruit.

Serious human-rights abuses are also associated with the banana export industry. In the 20th century, violent and deadly repression of labor unions, denial of basic workers’ rights, and the abuse of migrant laborers have been rife. Banana companies proved so meddlesome in the domestic policies of Central American nations that the latter became known as Banana Republics. For example, in 1954, the United States-based United Fruit Co. encouraged the CIA and U.S. State Department to back the coup and exile of democratically elected Guatemalan president Arbenz, who had championed the redistribution of idle banana holdings to landless peasants. In 1992, Chiquita’s threat to withdraw grower contracts caused the government of Panama to cancel a planned increase in the national minimum wage. Today, banana workers continue to struggle for adequate protection from toxic agrochemicals, the right to unionize, better living conditions, and wages commensurate with rising company profits (contract growers currently earn an estimated five to 10 percent of a banana’s final retail value; plantation workers, one to three percent). They accuse banana companies of keeping prices artificially low, and of rotating their operations internationally to avoid accountability to labor and environmental laws.

Since the 1990s, organic and Fair Trade initiatives, targeting environmental and social conditions in the banana industry, have met with modest success. Chiquita and other companies are now experimenting with sustainable farming methods to lessen the environmental impact of cultivation, including continuous cultivation, integrated pest management, crop rotation, and the reuse and recycling of wastes. Bananas too blemished for store shelves are processed into juices and baby food. Contract farmers, especially in the Caribbean, are also organizing into certified Fair Trade cooperatives that work with alternative distributors to sell their sustainably grown fruits for a living wage. Their success relies on the willingness of consumers to pay a premium for fairly traded organic bananas. To date, the movement has had greater success penetrating European than North American markets.

Bibliography:

Jason Clay, World Agriculture and the Environment: A Commodity-by-Commodity Guide to Impacts and Practices (Island Press, 2004);
Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (University of California Press, 2000);
Jon Hellin and Sophie Higman, Feeding the Market: South American Farmers, Trade, and Globalization (Kumarian Press, 2003);
W. Simmonds, Bananas (Longmans, 1966).