Banana Capital

Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator
by Ben Brisbois
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$34.95 ISBN 9781779400345

Dole. Chiquita. Del Monte. These banana empires are household names, and as a frequent consumer of bananas, I read Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator, by Montreal academic Ben Brisbois, with great interest. Frankly, though I’ve consumed a bunch of bananas in my lifetime, I’ve never peeled back their long and troubling story. Ben Brisbois has.

Over about fifteen years, Brisbois—an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine of the Université de Montréal’s School of Public Health—researched, analyzed, and wrote about pesticides’ dangerous health effects on the often exploited workers at banana plantations and farms, with his PhD fieldwork centred in the self-proclaimed “banana capital of the world,” Machala, Ecuador. He ”laboriously designed a project that would try to bring about real change by valuing the lived experiences of pesticide-affected banana workers and farmers, and by being realistic about the political and economic power relations [both globally and locally] affecting coastal Ecuador.”

There was much to unpack, and this reader got an education, beginning with the nefarious ecological and political history of banana production, including child labour. If I only retain one image from this comprehensive text, it will be of the exploitation of children. A 2002 Human Rights Watch report included interviews with “Children as young as eight, who worked long days in hazardous conditions with pervasive exposure to toxic pesticides such as chlorpyrifos and the fungicides constantly applied with backpack sprayers and fumigation planes. These children were often not allowed to exit the fields when planes passed overhead, instead hiding under banana leaves or cardboard boxes and using shirts or their hands to hold off the falling veneno (poison).” And this was daily life.

For as long as banana farming’s occurred, it appears major issues have existed: a “toxic soup of pesticides;” subcontracted labour; environmental injustice “(a term describing the disproportionate concentration of environmental risks in racialized, poor, and other marginalized communities);” lack of unions; corrupt governments; racism; and “brutally competitive global banana markets,” which put producers of small-scale banana farms/plantations in extremely precarious economic positions. When pressure becomes too great on banana giants, “companies have nimbly moved their sourcing to cheaper and less-protected jurisdictions,” Brisbois writes. Colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberal capitalism are part of the disparaging story, including “the granting of massive land concessions to US interests by Latin American governments.”

Another major concern is banana farming’s “enormous carbon footprint.” And research into the medical fallout from various pesticides is challenged as chemicals are frequently combined, so it’s difficult to know if cancers, birth defects, neurological impairment, depression, etc. can be attributed to certain pesticides, or are a result of political, social and economic inequities. The global pesticide industry has continually passed the buck and “steered policy and science” in favour of commerce.

It’s grim to consider that “So long as the disparities that imperialism created … are in place, markets for fruits will always be so skewed that huge injustices will persist.” This is something to think about.

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