Minimos, Platanos, y Dátiles

All is still well in Honduras. This week I'm supposed to be writing a 15 page paper on my theory of development. Depending on how it turns out, I might post it, but first I should probably write it...

Last week we visited a Chiquita banana plantation. Here's a little write up I did of our visit.

Historically, the banana industry has had the most workers rights protections of any sector in Honduras. This tradition of just employment goes all the way back to 1954, when Honduran plantation workers successfully won a strike against the Standard Fruit Company and United Fruit Company (present day Dole and Chiquita) to end the near slave labor conditions that had been implemented the last 60 years of the American businesses existence. However, since the early 2000s, the success and pull of banana unions in Honduras has been waning due to the establishment of a banana industry in Ecuador. Unlike its Central American counterparts, the Ecuador lacks basic worker protections, paying Ecuadorian plantation workers about a quarter of the wages ($56 a month) with no benefits (for example, the benefit of being able to work in an area of the plantation that is not being sprayed with highly toxic fungicide). This low wage allows the companies to be highly competitive with Central Amercian producers despite having to transport the bananas the extra distance to make it to American cities. Needless to say, this competition has put Honduran banana producers in a rough position, and many of the banana workers’ gains have been lost in Honduras, and the producers have even begun to implement labor practices similar to those found in Ecuador. We visited a plantation and saw the well-organized system that was being implemented in Honduras, and later visited the first banana union founded in Honduras after the 1954 strike, listening to the members tell us of their struggles and the abuses that workers were beginning to face more and more. I need to be cautious in saying this, because I am not a well educated economist, and am mostly speaking from a limited view of the issue. From what I understand of free trade, it may well be a wonderful thing for the world economy or for businesses, but the reality that I saw in the banana plantations (and the maquilas) is far from wonderful. Free trade expects grocery chains to look to Ecuador for bananas because the price of the commodity is lower just as much as it requires that they turn a blind eye to the labor abuses taking place on those plantations. Free trade then creates the new price for Honduran bananas, expecting them to reach their profit margins by whatever means necessary. Businesses may be growing, but workers are suffering, and I cannot think of a single moment where the ends should ever justify the means, especially when the means includes the degradation of human life and rights.

On another note, studying the banana sector, it becomes evident that given the workings of the world economy, in order to improve the situation of workers in one area, the situation has to be improved everywhere. Honduran banana workers are having their rights and wages stripped, but it may be true that the best way for their condition to be improved is to change the injustice that is occurring in Ecuador. In part, this is exciting, because it expands the areas in which change can come, and allows for the improvement of an entire sector of the economy; however, it also proves to loom a little daunting to recognize the size of the problem of labor violations, and to recognize just how large the effort needs to be to confront the problem. Looking to previous successes of the Honduran unions, to the successes seen in the maquila industry (more on this later), thankfully this is an effort that will produce results, and definitely is a cause worth standing for and defending.

Viajando a la historia

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted on here. Since last post, I spent a weekend in El Salvador (maybe more on that later), got back Monday night, and left for San Pedro Sula the next morning. We visited a maquila, a workers rights organization, a Chiquita banana plantation, and Honduras’s oldest union of banana workers (for sure more on that in the next couple days). From there we went to Copan, where we visited the archeological remains of one of the biggest political and artistic centers of the Mayan civilization.

The last time I was at Copan, I didn’t really have much sense of worth for the ruins, temples, and stelas that were around us. It just seemed to me that the Mayan people had lived and died without really changing the course of my history. Yes, it was true that they made incredible advances in astronomy and science, but it wasn’t as if they had significantly altered the rate at which the rest of the world learned science. The building they built are quite impressive architectural feats, especially considering they were without the wheel, but again these temples had little pull on world building styles. However, after reading the Collapse article, I was able to look at everything with new eyes this time. The reality is that the Mayan people were not that much different from Americans of present day. They were very interested in consumption and in the expansion of their culture and style, to the point of excessiveness. The sobering piece of it is that these things caused the collapse of the Mayan culture. The environmental crisis that is looming over us right now is not a brand new event that the earth has never had to deal with before, the reality is that the Mayan people faced a similar environmental crisis. Massive deforestation of the mountainsides around Mayan cities supplied the stucco to build elaborate palaces and courtyards, but it also allowed for the extreme erosion of Mayan farms and loss of soil fertility. Thus decreased food production occurred at the very same time as the Mayan population reached even higher levels. Adding to all this the decreased water retention in the eroded soil, through a series of 4 droughts, 99% of the Mayan population disappeared in a matter of 40 to 60 years. Unlike I had insistently told my friends when we visited Copan 2 years ago, the Mayan civilization is not merely dead, gone, and meaningless to us. Unfortunately, this civilization gives a very real, very dramatic example of what over consumption and disregard for the environment can lead to. I’m thinking this would be a good point in history to study in an effort to avoid repeating.