Today my host Dr Ortiz is taking several of us on a tour of a banana plantation. I guess the goal is to show us what the lives of some of the workers is and to imagine what sort of healthcare needs they might have. To get to the banana plantation we pass through some crazy mountain roads. We pass the summit in the clouds shivering and then end up in tropical climate at the Panama border. Interestingly the borders are all open. So in the picture below the left side is Panama (where alcohol and most consumer goods are really cheap) and the right side is Costa Rica (where cigarettes are cheaper due to fewer taxes).
We straddle the border for some time and then come across plantation after plantation. There are 2 types: palm trees for palm oil and bananas. These plantations used to be owned privately but a few years back the government took them over and now they are each collectively owned by the workers who farm the land. They are called cooperatives. Sounds like a great idea but apparently these people are extremely poor. Each co-op has a planned town with buildings arranged around (you guessed it) a soccer field. All the workers live there. There is a school every couple of co-ops.
The banana factory is approx the size of 2 large roadside gas stations from the US. Here´s a rundown of the trip the fruit takes. First it is covered by blue plastic bags so bugs and birds don´t eat it all while it is ripening on the tree. While still green, the bananas are harvested in a large bunch in the fields and then carried by 2 or more workers to a trolley system where they are hung on a track. After approx 15 bunches are gathered like this, they are chained together and a worker hauls them back to the factory via a cable hitched to his belt. This is basically like the guy who collects the shopping carts at the grocery store parking lot but it´s all 15 ft up in the air on a suspended track. Also interesting is that the bananas trees have been bred to be low enough to the ground that a ladder is not needed to harvest the fruit. Smart. And the plants continually produce fruit non-stop all year round.
On arrival the large bunch of approximately 80 bananas is chopped up into the more familiar bunches of 5-10 and put into a water tank. From there it passes through a series of workers whose job it is to pull out the rejects from the assembly line. For example if a banana is too big, too long, or too stocky it will be put in the reject conveyer belt. I guess this makes sense as I have never seen an oddly shaped banana in the store in the US. But where do these rejects go? Simple. They are loaded on a truck and sold in Central American markets. The rest are further cleansed and then boxed up and loaded onto a tractor trailer. The factory foreman says they process at most 2 truckloads of bananas per day.
This is an örganic fair trade¨plant so only a mild chemical is sprayed onto the bunches during the process. Also rather comical is that there are multiple sets of brand name stickers at the plant. depending on what day and what truck they are loading a banana either gets stamped as Dole, Del Monte or Oke. So literally there is no difference in the fruits between those brands. Oh and box of approx 100 bananas fetches ~$7 for the cooperative. The rest of the markup in price must be going to the company shipping them from this field, across mountain roads, onto a boat, and across the Atlantic or Pacific, onto a truck and into a supermarket in Europe or the US.
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