Florentina looks upset and has tears in her eyes as she says, in a tremulous but hopeful voice: “There was a time when we were hungry, I’m not ashamed to say it. We had to pay our debt and by the sweat of our brow we did it. I am alone with three children and there are many women like me in my village”.
Florentina is a banana farmer and has just returned from working in the fields. Her face tells of the effort as she contributes to a Fairtrade Foundation video dedicated to the story of her cooperative, COOBANA.
We are in Panama which, up until the ‘90s, was a stand-out tropical paradise where this fruit was cultivated, at the point where the world’s commercial routes intersect, a transfer point between Central America, Europe and North America. At the time, the banana business in this country was in the hands of just one multinational, owned by the state, which employed the workers needed to farm the plantations. But in the early ‘90s, the state sacked them and the farmers fell upon desperate times. We talk to Julio Quintero, one such farmer: “I started to work in those plantations when I was 10 and doing so meant I couldn’t go to school. I believed we would remain jobless and in the deepest despair. But then we thought - what if we were to carry on alone? After all, no one knew more about banana farming than us”.
And so, around seventy farmers like Julio founded COOBANA, Cooperativa Bananera del Atlantico, trying to involve other groups of producers. At that time, the state was selling off its plantations and the farmers decided to buy them, somehow managing to obtain a loan. They worked for twenty years to repay that debt and always for the same clients, until they met Fairtrade and the fair trade importers in 2009. Certifying their production with the Fairtrade mark, they obtained a stable minimum price (which adjusts to market price when this is higher) and a Fairtrade bonus that the cooperative collectively decided how to spend, specifically, to improve workers’ salaries, to support community schools, to ensure the training of producers and workers, but also to improve the quality of the product.
For these producers, gaining Fairtrade certification also meant paying attention to the environment and their health, as the list of banned chemicals for certified products is very long and continually updated. Where there is no organic, there is integrated production where the use of potentially harmful substances is prohibited.
“Fairtrade is freedom, dialogue, sustainability and, above all, the chance for producers to take back their lives”, concludes Diomedes Rodriguez, a member of COOBANA.
