I suspect that many of my readers, who no doubt enjoy my astute analysis of American politics, may wonder at times why I focus so much on the United States while I am in fact living in a different country. After all, this blog is titled "Dispatches from the Rich Coast" but I have only written one post on the Rich Coast, aka Costa Rica. To you I say, "that's a good question". I suppose like most Americans and many around the world, the 2008 U.S. elections as well as the global financial crisis, whose epicenter is in the United States, just grabbed most of my attention. Today I will break my months-long silence on Costa Rican issues and henceforth, I will try to do a better job of covering local news in my blog, while still writing the posts about American politics that my loyal fans have come to know and love. I'm going to break the silence by talking a bit about the pineapple, which despite its sweetness, leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of many Costa Ricans.
Pineapples have long been part of the Costa Rican diet but until very recently, pineapples were grown in Costa Rica almost exclusively for domestic consumption. That all changed, according to Joanna Blythman from the Guardian (UK), in 1996 when Del Monte unveiled a new variety of pineapple known as the "Del Monte Gold". Del Monte named its new variety the "Gold" because unlike most pineapples available at the time, which had green skin, the flesh of Del Monte's new pineapple was bright yellow. The green pineapples available before 1996 were often hard and quite sour, but this new breed of fruit was softer and much sweeter. Furthermore, the Del Monte Gold was far healthier: compared with the old, greener varieties of pineapples, this new variety had 4 times the vitamin C. After the introduction of the Del Monte Gold, which was copied by other large fruit companies as well, demand for pineapple in Europe, Asia, and North America shot up. In order to respond to higher demand, Del Monte decided to ramp up production. But rather than expand in its traditional production platform, Hawaii, where the Gold was developed and where employers are required to provide health insurance to their workers and must deal with a highly unionized workforce, Del Monte decided to start growing pineapples on a massive scale in Costa Rica instead. By 2007, according to a spectacular report by the International Labor Rights Fund that I highly suggest you read if you have the time, Costa Rica was the #1 exporter of fresh pineapples in the world. Costa Rica exported half a billion dollars worth of pineapples in 2007. Further, 90% of all pineapples imported by the United States come from Costa Rica. Needless to say, if you've eaten a pineapple recently, it was almost certainly grown in Costa Rica.
There are several major beneficiaries of the meteoric rise in pineapple production in Costa Rica over the past decade. First on that list is undoubtedly Del Monte, whose Costa Rican subsidiary, The Pineapple Development Corporation (PINDECO), is responsible for over half of Costa Rica's pineapple production. The pineapple has helped Del Monte catch up with its more established fruit-exporting rival, Chiquita, which has had less success entering the pineapple market. Secondly, North American and European consumers, who can now eat fresh, sweet, and cheap pineapple year-round, have certainly benefited as well. Unfortunately, the workers in Costa Rica's pineapple plantations and packing houses, the communities surrounding major centers of pineapple production, and the Costa Rican environment are not among the beneficiaries of pineapple production. Rather, the dramatic expansion of pineapple production has been more of a curse than a blessing for the Costa Rican environment, as well as many of its workers and communities.
A hot, wet climate is required for pineapple growth and many regions of Costa Rica, particularly the Caribbean Coast, have both heat and humidity in abundance. However, in order to expand pineapple production and provide the fruit with the sunlight it needs, many forests have been cleared, at times, according to the Miami Herald, illegally. Deforestation is particularly problematic in Costa Rica because it is home to a disproportionate share of the world's biodiversity. According to the Costa Rican National Biodiversity Institute, a government agency, Costa Rica is home to 4% of the species of plants and animals in the world's while covering only .03% of the world's landmass. Continued expansion of pineapple production is a threat to Costa Rica's biodiversity, of which Costa Ricans are justifiably proud.
Costa Rican pineapple production is for the most part highly intensive, industrialized mono-culture. As such, it requires the application of large amounts of pesticides and agro-chemicals, much of which ends up in the soil and the groundwater of the surrounding areas. Many of the agro-chemicals used in pineapple production are harmful to human beings and several of the pesticides used on these plantations are banned for use in the United States by the EPA. Recently, the Costa Rican government began daily shipments of water to a 6,000 person community in the heart of pineapple country in the Caribbean, after tests showed unsafe amounts of Bromacil, a pesticide used on the pineapple plantations, in local aquifers.
Sadly, this is just a small sample of the myriad environmental abuses of the Costa Rican pineapple industry.
The pineapple industry is a major employer in some parts of Costa Rica; in 2006, the pineapple industry employed 100,000 people throughout the country. Unfortunately, the pineapple companies are as dedicated to respecting the rights and dignity of their workers as they are dedicated to protecting the environment. Many of the workers who toil in the pineapple industry are undocumented immigrants from Nicaragua (hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have left their country to live and work in far more prosperous Costa Rica). The conditions faced by undocumented Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica's pineapple industry are frighteningly similar to that of undocumented workers in the U.S. According to the ILRF report:
they fear...losing their jobs or being deported if they speak up or try to join a union, [suffer from] underpayment of wages and forced overtime, and abusive treatment. If they complain, the farm managers call the police to check their papers, so they rarely report problems.
Pineapple pickers in the fields make about $1.20 per hour and are rarely paid overtime. Workers in the packing houses (where pineapples are washed and processed for export) are paid not by the hour but by how many boxes of pineapples they pack in a day. As a result, they end up getting paid even less than workers in the fields. Work in the packing houses is also far less stable; at times, if for some reason there are no pineapples to pack, workers are just sent home without pay. Not coincidentally, workers in the packing houses are predominantly women while workers in the fields are almost exclusively men. In both the packing houses and the fields, pineapple workers labor for 10 to 12 hours a day and days off are rare. According to a 2005 study conducted by ASEPROLA, a Central American labor rights organization, pineapple workers can work as long as 3 weeks in a row without a day off.
In order to avoid legal responsibilities such as paying social security contributions, the large pineapple transnationals avoid hiring permanent, full time workers. Instead, they often hire workers, fire them after three months (at which point the employer must begin contributing to the workers' social security and provide them with other benefits), and then rehire them. Maintaining a flexible, unstable labor force is also, according to ILRF, part of the pineapple companies' strategy to discourage union membership. Because the workers must be rehired every few months, they constantly fear losing their job and are reluctant to complain about their situation. At times, the pineapple exporters also hire subcontractors, who then must recruit and pay the laborers themselves. Doing so absolves the companies of all legal responsibility for their workers. The companies also pit the subcontractors against each other, driving down costs further.
As mentioned above, pineapples are grown in hot and humid regions, so the workers who labor in the fields for 10 to 12 hours a day must do so under intense sunlight with little shade. The heat and, and particularly the humidity can also reach oppressive levels in the packing plants, where the largely female workforce are forced to stand all day. Further, pineapple workers must directly handle the same toxic chemicals that end up in the soils and groundwater of neighboring communities. Inevitably, this has a negative on the workers' health. According to the Costa Rican Human Rights Ombudsman, a public agency charged with monitoring human rights in the country:
relating the environment to the health issue it can be observed that the respiratory illnesses in the area have a close relationship to the unmeasured use of pesticides that are used and the solvent mixture. Evidence has shown that it only takes about 2-3 years to start developing health issues after working in the pineapple plantations.
Additionally, pineapple exporters are virulently anti-union and employ a wide variety of tactics to trample on the labor rights of their employees. In 2007, Grupo Acon, a major Dole supplier, fired all of its workers, claiming it was for their benefit because they became entitled to severance pay, and stated it would soon rehire them. However, many union supporters were not offered their jobs back and were denied their severance pay. Several companies have also employed this tactic to get rid of unwanted older workers (which is illegal). Many companies hire armed guards who physically prevent union representatives from entering their plantations. Workers are also subjected to intense, Wal-Martesque anti-union propaganda. Grupo Acon makes its workers watch a video which demonizes unions and blames them for the closure of several banana plantations in the Southern Pacific Coast of Costa Rica in the 1980s. Further, women workers are sexually harassed on a consistent basis and many have been fired for filing formal complaints.
Moreover, Pineapple expansion has been particularly harmful for small farmers. Mono-crop pineapple agriculture attracts new pests to the region that destroy food crops and bother livestock so much that they stop eating and starve to death. Expansion of pineapple production also drives up the cost of land. Combined, these effects have led to the displacement of many small farmers, who are then often forced to work on the pineapple plantations to survive. Further, land once used to produce local staple crops like rice, corn, and beans is transferred to pineapple production for export, eroding Costa Rica's food sovereignty and increasing its dependence on food imports.
Opposition to further expansion of pineapple production has grown so intense, given its manifest negative impact on the environment, workers, and small farmers, that many communities have organized themselves and formed associations to oppose the pineapple conglomerates. These groups include the Popular Front Against Pollution, formed to confront pesticide contamination caused by Del Monte, The Frente Nacional de los Sectores Afectados por la Expansión de la Piñera (The national front of sectors affected by pineapple expansion), a coalition of community groups which has employed tactics like roadblocks to protest pineapple expansion, and Foro Emaús, a network of religious, labor, community, and environmental groups which was formed with the aim of humanizing banana production, but has recently expanded its focus to pineapples. The Frente Nacional and Foro Emaús have jointly released two videos documenting the myriad abuses of the pineapple industry and their reasons for opposing its expansion. You can check them out right here:
The Reality of Pineapple is not so Sweet:
The Bitter Taste of Pineapple:
As I mentioned many paragraphs ago, 90% of the pineapples imported by the United States come from Costa Rica which means that you, the American consumer of pineapples, play a big role in this whole process. Some of my readers may hopefully be wondering, well, what can I do about this? Personally, I think the best thing to do as an individual is look for Fair Trade Certified Pineapples. Fair Trade pineapples are grown by cooperatives of small farmers and thus grown in a more socially responsible and environmentally sustainable manner than the average plantation-grown pineapple on the market. If you can't find Fair Trade pineapples, tell your supermarket to stock them! In the meantime, you'll probably have more luck finding organic pineapples, which likely still exploit their workers, but at least don't put them and their communities in contact with toxic pesticides and chemicals. At a minimum, the next time you bite into a delicious, sweet pineapple, just realize that workers and communities thousands of miles away in Costa Rica made a lot sacrifices for you to have that piece of fruit.
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