The Fairtrade Foundation has today launched a new campaign aimed at compelling UK supermarkets to put up the price of bananas.
In a major new initiative, dubbed Make Bananas Fair, the Fairtrade Foundation plans to target Vince Cable, calling on the business secretary to open an investigation into the banana trade in the UK and evaluate the impact of retail pricing on both producers and UK consumers.
Most controversially, Fairtrade Foundation chief executive Michael Gidney suggested he would like to see a level of minimum pricing introduced whereby supermarkets would be required to sell at a sustainable level. He also urged retailers to publish the price they pay to banana growers.
Gidney argued that low prices, which supermarkets claim are important for consumers during times of economic hardship, will not benefit the public in the long run if it means banana supply dries up. He also insisted it was clear that neither supermarkets nor suppliers were making any money from the price wars.
“Small farmers and plantation workers are the collateral damage in supermarkets price wars,” he said. “The poorest people are bearing the cost of our cheap bananas and they have to work harder and harder as what they earn is worth less and less in their communities. As a result, a product that is worth billions of pounds in global trade relies on poverty-level income for the people who grow it.”
The Fairtrade Foundation also believes there should be more protection for overseas suppliers, and says competition law should not just focus on consumers, but the supply chain as well.
Falling prices
According to a new Fairtrade Foundation report, entitled Britain’s Bruising Banana Wars, the UK supermarket sector has almost halved the shelf price of loose bananas in the last 10 years, while the cost of producing them has doubled. A loose banana now typically costs 11p, compared with 18p a decade ago, while living costs for banana growers in Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador have risen by 85 per cent, 350 per cent and 240 per cent respectively.
The Fairtrade Foundation argues that downward price pressure in UK supermarkets is leading to a shift in banana-producing countries towards job losses, the casualisation of labour and the marginalisation of smallholder producers. It is also making it more difficult for the industry to tackle serious long-term problems such as the Black Sigatoka disease.
It says it has conducted research indicating 84 per cent of consumers would be willing to pay more for their bananas if they knew that money was going straight back to farmers.
As well as calling on Cable to investigate the market, the Fairtrade Foundation wants the Department for International Development to ensure the UK’s positive impact on poverty among banana farmers and workers is strengthened by supporting initiatives that incentivise living wages and payment of the cost of sustainable production in agricultural supply chains.
'No real profit'
A range of public activity kicks off today to coincide with Fairtrade Fortnight. The public faces of the new campaign include comedian Harry Hill and Colombian banana farmer Albeiro Alfonso ‘Foncho’ Cantillo, who will make the case on behalf of producers.
“With my hand on my heart, the price that we get for our produce is not enough for us to sustain production over here,” Cantillo said. “It is too low for us to have a good quality of life, or at least a decent one. We don’t see real profit from the effort we put in.”
For more news and in-depth analysis on this story, see next week’s FPJ.
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