If you don't want to outsource the social and environmental cost of bananas, buy Fairtrade. That was the message of Lucy Siegle of the UK's Observer newspaper in her article of 7 February.
The phasing out of the €176-per-tonne tariff on Latin American bananas entering the EU, ending the so-called international banana wars, she argued, was 'anything but' fair.
'The ACP producers are primarily small-scale farmers and cannot compete with Latin American producers, who have flooded the market with cheap bananas grown on giant monoculture plantations carved out of the rainforest,' she wrote.
Ms Siegle equally noted the concerns of environmentalists, who have pointed out the high use of agrichemicals on the Latin American crop. Only cotton production used more pesticides, she said.
Over the past decade, the Windward Islands, which once supplied the majority of UK bananas, have lost 20,000 small-scale farmers, and Ms Siegle described the prospects for the remaining 5,000 as 'grim'.
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