Letter 2 – Bananas Organic and Fair Trade
We’re in the south coast of Ecuador: El Oro province is
banana-landia, the world capital of commercial banana production. Most of the commercial fields are
mono-cropped like this one by the highway. Most use lots of
herbicides and pesticides: hazard to workers, burden on the ecosystem.
We visited a Heifer Ecuador project in the midst of El Oro
province. In 2004, a plucky group of farmers formed a cooperative association,
nicknamed AsoGuabo, to market organic, fair-trade bananas. When we visited,
Heifer Ecuador was assisting them over the course of several years in several
ways: organizational management, technical help with drip irrigation, a grant
from which coop members could get micro-loans — oh, and gifted flocks of
chickens, in Heifer style, to farming families. Here we make our way through
one coop member’s mixed forest inter-planted with banana, the opposite of
mono-cropping.
Carlos Cuenca, a farmer member of the coop, and Michael
Calle, the coop manager, explain the fine points of processing bananas for the
organic market. Besides managing pests, the farmers have to gauge ripeness
exactly, trim them just so, float them in a water bath during handling so as to
never bruise them, and pack the bananas in boxes weighing exactly 44 lbs.
It’s amazing to learn what goes into the bananas that we so
casually buy and eat. Although there is no way to buy AsoGuabo bananas at home,
we promised ourselves to seek out organic, fair-trade fruit, knowing now what
that means to the organic, fair-trade farmers on the growing end of the
transaction.
Read more about Heifer Ecuador empowering women entrepreneurs in El Oro.
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