Despite a bunch of successes over its 30 years of existence, UK-based Banana Link faces some familiar challenges as it continues to strive for sustainability across the banana supply chain
Much has changed in the world of bananas since Alistair Smith founded the Banana Link organisation back in 1996, one man’s effort, initially, to shine a light on the overlooked inequalities persisting throughout the supply chain of what remains the UK’s most purchased food product.
In the last 30 years, Fairtrade has become mainstream; living wages have entered the industry’s vocabulary; and trade unions now have a seat at the table alongside the powerful multinationals and supermarkets. And yet, the discussion remains largely the same.
After three decades of campaigning for workers’ rights and environmental improvements, what we see is climate change, disease pressure and unsustainably low prices continuing to threaten the future of the sector.
“For us, bananas demonstrate some of the dysfunctions of the world economy,” Smith told Fruitnet, “the social costs that are not counted, the environmental costs that are not counted and the unfair distribution of value.”
Smith pointed to Fairtrade as one of the sector’s biggest success stories. In Europe, Fairtrade bananas account for more than 10 per cent of sales; in the UK they represent more than a quarter of the market.
“It’s broken out of the niche,” said Smith. “We’d like to think Fairtrade has also influenced the conventional model, with non-Fair trade producers in Latin America citing the Fairtrade minimum price as a benchmark, for example.”
Smith believes Banana Link’s biggest achievement is visible in how its core issues are now all on the agenda. Thirty years ago, discussions around pesticide exposure, workers’ rights and environmental impacts were often unwelcome, he remembered. “We were treated with serious doubt or serious hostility,” he said, “because we started raising issues that nobody else was talking about.”
Today, he continued, the picture has changed dramatically. “Trade unions whose voice was not even known about 30 years ago are now seriously listened to, and their proposals are taken seriously,” revealed Smith. “There’s a lot less of the flagrant violations that you might have found 30 years ago, particularly in plantations in Africa or Latin America.”
Giving producers a voice
One of Banana Link’s proudest achievements is its role in establishing the World Banana Forum. Smith recalls organising two major international conferences in 1998 and 2005 that brought together groups that had rarely spoken directly.
Those meetings ultimately led to the creation of the Forum under the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. “It allowed us to start talking about solutions and not just about problems,” he said.
According to Smith, the banana industry is now ahead of many other agricultural sectors in discussing living wages and decent work. “There’s no other sector in the world economy where living wages are on everybody’s lips and real movement is happening,” he said. “You can’t say that for palm oil, you can’t say it for soya, but in bananas nobody can ignore the global movement towards decent work and living wages.”
Despite such progress, many plantation workers continue to face difficult conditions, according to Banana Link’s Latin America coordinator, Holly Woodward-Davey. “The pressing issues for workers are around unpaid overtime, low wages and contractual discrimination faced by women workers,” she revealed.
Since labour represents such a significant share of banana production costs, price pressures frequently fall on workers. “If the prices being paid to producers are not sufficiently high, that pressure gets pushed down,” she said.
The result can include precarious employment, greater use of temporary and migrant labour and continued concerns around pesticide exposure. Certification has brought benefits, she said, but also new challenges.
“There is an incredible amount of pressure for producers to meet the bureaucratic needs of multiple certifications and standards, and it’s completely unsustainable for them.
While Fairtrade remains highly valued because it delivers predictable prices and premiums, growers increasingly complain about the burden of meeting multiple retailers’ own standards. “What we hear loud and clear is that it’s overwhelming,” said Woodward-Davey. “There is a lot of duplication of effort, and the burden is on the producers.”
Pushing for a new approach
Looking ahead, Smith believes climate change will force the industry to rethink how bananas are produced. The spread of Fusarium TR4 has highlighted the vulnerability of relying too heavily on a single variety, but Smith argues genetics alone will not solve the problem.
“There are companies who think they can get away with changing very little in the production system,” he said. “They are relying on a nice genetically engineered fix or a new variety that’s going to solve our problem. We don’t believe it’s as easy as that.”
Some companies are thinking outside the box, he said, pointing to examples of rotational fallow, reduced chemical use and more diverse production systems emerging in Africa and Colombia.
Ultimately, Banana Link wants to see far greater investment in production methods that improve resilience rather than simply searching for technological fixes. “We can’t go on depending on a monoculture that is threatened by a major disease,” he said.
One issue that continues to cut through to consumers above all others is the price of bananas at the retail level. “Bananas cannot continue to be sold at less than £1 a kilo,” Smith insists. “When you consider all the costs that are not paid into that price, that can’t go on.”
While acknowledging concerns around the affordability of healthy food, Smith argues that bananas remain disproportionately cheap compared with other fruit. He believes retailers have both the responsibility and the ability to change that.
“The retailers and the big fruit companies have a huge responsibility in showing people that investment within the sector can deliver change, “ he said, “and not just cosmetic change.”
Banana Link is also calling on the UK government to introduce stronger supply chain legislation. Woodward-Davey said the proposed Business, Human Rights and Environment Act could mirror similar due diligence laws already operating elsewhere in Europe if it were enacted in the UK.
“It would be a really important move that the government could make, that would ensure that retailers continue to pay more attention to what’s happening in their supply chains and are accountable for it,” she said.
The organisation also wants public sector procurement to be brought within the legislation’s scope. “From what we know about public sector supply chains, where bananas are bought for hospitals and schools, there’s very little transparency,” said Woodward-Davey. “Some of our partners producing under ethical and organic conditions can’t even get past the first bureaucratic hurdle, because their bananas are a few millimetre too big, for example.”
For all the progress Banana Link has witnessed since 1996, Smith believes the next phase will require even greater collaboration across the supply chain. The organisation wants to continue amplifying workers’ voices while accelerating the transition towards more resilient production systems.
Above all, however, he believes the economics of the banana business must change. “We hope the message around bananas being too cheap gets through,” he said. “There is not enough value to distribute fairly along the chain. A fair consumer price for bananas isn’t going to make that much difference to shoppers, but it could make a huge difference to everybody producing them.”
