Thursday June 8th, I left Manglaralto for San Juan, a
small town in what is apparently the second largest banana producing region of
Ecuador. Outside of town I met Ngabo, a
Peace Corps volunteer, at a shopping mall that could easily have been anywhere
in the USA. The only tips otherwise were
signs such as “ordenar aqui” at the KFC, and Carl's Jr. Ngabo works at Fundacion Dale—a keen reader
might note the similarity to Dole, and they would be correct to make the
link. Dale stands for something about helping
Ecuadorians, but written in that unmistakable font with a sun shining through
the 'a' as it does the 'o' in Dole, and there is no question for whom Dale
works. That said, it is clearly doing
good things. Dale runs free private
clinics for workers and families, and has built and maintains two public
schools for the communities in the area.
Ngabo does HIV sensitization, which in his region is apparently more of
a problem than it is on the coast, among other health projects and student
workshops. He was fabulous, I could not
have asked for a better contact or guide.
Upon meeting up we immediately went to one of the Dale schools where
Ngabo had worked over the summer, and which is situated deep inside of banana
and cacao plantation territory. Although
the school was interesting to see, more exciting for me was the chance to talk
to workers on their way out of the plantations or “fincas”.
Unlike in some plantation systems, the
fincas in Ecuador do not generally contained whole communities. At least not
according to Ngabo. Rather, the workers
live in surrounding communities, some of which are right next to plantations,
but one worker we spoke with lives an hour away. Even though we were right outside the finca,
the workers were very forthcoming about work at Dole. In general they were all agreed that work at
Naboa (the other banana company across the road) was far worse. Unlike Naboa they said, Dole generally gave out protective equipment
when handling chemicals, although not always, and they were all given a variety
of work from day to day, something which they seemed to appreciate. This finca, known as finca Elba, does not
have a unionized workforce, however as was later corroborated, the workers told
me that another Dole plantation nearby does in fact have a union. But all they were able to tell me about it
was the fact that union dues were deducted at $13 dollars per month. In one
response to whether they wanted a union at Elba a worker said, “it is
just not something that we would have here.”
This however was not their complaint.
Rather, after two minutes of speaking with them they told me about a
wage dispute they were having. Though
government mandated minimum wage for banana workers was raised from $292 to
$328 at the beginning of 2013, according to the workers, Dole only started the
new rate in June, and had yet to pay their back wages. Needless to say, if true, that would be
pretty serious delinquency on the part of Dole.
 |
| Me and Henry counting bananas per bunch (about 150) |
After lunch we were taken onto a different
plantation by Henry Morales, a friend of Ngabo's who is a quality control
manager for Dole. Between raucous
laughter fast Spanish and broken yet proud English, Henry led us to the
packaging plant of an affiliated finca, in other words, a banana plantation not
owned by Dole but whose product is exclusively bought and exported by Dole. It was a something to behold, and Henry held
nothing back. He insisted I ask him
anything and everything about the process.
I spent the whole time trying my hardest to absorb information he was
throwing at us a mile-a-minute—everything from how many different fungi can
form on the banana, to what sort of pesticide they use on the banana bags. Unfortunately we only had one hour at the
packaging plant and I did not feel comfortable asking about worker-management
issues. Just long enough to get a sense
for how banana processing works, and to watch Henry Morales chew a number of
managers out for poor practices (I guess that's his job).
 |
| Cuenca |
Ngabo's host family was nice enough to put
me up for the night. The next day we
left bright and early—As I write I am in Cuenca relaxing for a couple days
before Loja and the coffee farm.
No comments:
Post a Comment