Original post at The Nation.
True equality and sustainability can only be attained when we recognize where inequity and unsustainability come from. Consider something as simple as a banana. In the banana industry, workers are treated poorly: They’re exposed to dangerous pesticides and toil for low and uncertain wages. Fair-trade organic bananas offer a solution to this: no more pesticides (organic bananas!) and better pay for farmers.
But a fair-trade label on bananas guarantees neither equity nor sustainability. Even when consumers pay more for the promise that farmers are getting a better-than-market price, the evidence of positive outcomes remains mixed. Fair trade only sometimes raises farmers’ incomes—and for migrant workers, protections are rare. Also, there is some evidence that fair trade deepens household gender inequality when farm families specialize in the cultivation of export-driven cash crops.
Most important, fair trade takes for granted that Latin America, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Global South ought to task themselves in perpetuity with growing our bananas. Fair trade doesn’t force us to confront how these countries became America’s fruit bowl.
For instance, more than one in three bananas on US store shelves come from Guatemala. When Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz tried in 1952 to inaugurate land reform for dispossessed peasants, the United Fruit Company was so concerned that it called its friends in the CIA, which initiated a coup that led to a 36-year civil war in which 200,000 people died—most at the hands of the brutal military and security services—and for which President Bill Clinton apologized in 1999. Nor was Guatemala the only case: The term “banana republic” was originally coined to describe Honduras and its neighbors, sovereign states dominated by American companies like United Fruit, backed by US military force.
Equity and sustainability demand more than a mere apology. Guatemala is among the world’s top 10 countries for long-term vulnerability to climate change, its economy battered by extreme weather, its coastline redrawn by rising seas. For true equity, the United States needs to recognize its debt with reparations—reparations for the many ways we continue to benefit from past horrors in the food system, both here and abroad.
There’s no magic number that we in the United States can put on this, no sufficient check to write. But surely it’s better to recognize how far back in time we need to go to accept responsibility for our actions, how deep that debt runs, and how inequity and unsustainability continue to mount under capitalism. To evade this long, hard reckoning is to ask for a very attenuated kind of equity and sustainability—the kind whose demands can be shrunk to fit on a label.