The Un-Banana Boat : Technology transforms the shipping of fruit, eliminating waste--and jobs.
The latest thing in banana boats was docked at the Port of Los Angeles, and produce buyer Bill Clark had come all the way down from Fresno to take a look.
Clark watched as giant mechanized claws grabbed trailer-sized containers of Ecuadorean bananas from the hull of the ship Dole California and whisked the cargo to trucks waiting on the dock. Inside, he walked around the computers that will awake a sleeping crew if it spots trouble in any of the 455 temperature-controlled banana containers.
“This is so exciting for a banana person,” said Clark, who buys the fruit for O. K. Produce. “It’s a turn-on.”
The banana business is abuzz about the modern wizardry that will make the task of shipping the fruit from Central and South America much faster and efficient. But the introduction of technology will also eliminate jobs for hundreds of longshoreman and end the colorful, if not messy scene, on the banana docks at U.S. ports.
Automated System
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Richard Lomeli, an official with the International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union, who once unloaded banana stalks as tall as a grown man. “It’s just automation taking over.”
One objective of all this automation: a better looking banana. Under the method that is still widely used, cartons of the fruit are loaded and unloaded several times before they reach market--an expensive and time-consuming operation that often leads to bruised bananas.
To ease the bruises and cut costs and time, Dole Fresh Fruit Co., a subsidiary of Castle & Cook Inc., has spent $150 million to buy the 11,800-ton Dole California, a sister container ship and other equipment.
Under the automated system, plantation workers in Ecuador load nearly 1,000 40-pound boxes of bananas into refrigerated container trucks set at a constant 57.5 degrees. “It’s never handled again until it’s in the customer’s warehouse,” said David D. DeLorenzo, president of Dole Fresh Fruit.
The trucks then head for port, where the containers are loaded on ships and embark on a six-day ocean voyage to Los Angeles. Once they arrive, they are again hoisted on trucks, and the bananas are hauled away to buyers as far as Denver and Western Canada in cool comfort.
Besides commanding a premium price for its bananas, Dole enjoys a big payoff at the port. What once took 200 longshoremen three days to unload now takes about a dozen men less than 10 hours. Even the ship’s crew has shrunk to 23 from 35. “We save a lot of money,” said Steve Babitch, Dole Terminal manager. “It’s not as labor-intensive as it once was.”
It is an efficient and neat manner to ship bananas. Even with 9,100 tons of bananas on board, the Dole California offered no clues as to its cargo. Not a banana was in sight, and the ship smelled of fresh paint, not fresh fruit.
In contrast, shipping bananas in the past was a much more hands-on and dirty business. Before the bananas began arriving in cartons during the 1960s, the fruit arrived still attached to giant stalks.
More Ships Coming In
Longshoremen would haul a stalk over each shoulder. They traded stories about the tarantulas and snakes they encountered. “It was a dirty job,” said Lomeli, whose first job on the dock was unloading bananas. “The sap leaked out on you. Everybody had their own banana gear. Everybody has done it.”
Not for long. Although more than 200,000 tons of bananas arrive at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles every year, most are expected to arrive in container form.
The day the Dole California arrived in port, about 200 workers who would normally unload the banana boat were sitting in the longshoremen’s San Pedro union hall waiting for other jobs, Lomeli said.
Officials at Dole play down the loss of dockworker jobs, saying the new automation will allow for more deliveries and more employment down the road. “We will have more ships in here, and it will mean more people to handle it,” said Castle & Cook Chairman David H. Murdock during a dockside reception feting the first load of bananas transported under the new system.
But Lomeli is more pessimistic about the future: “They are no longer needed,” he said of the workers waiting at the union hall. “These people are not going to have anything in the near future.”
