Human Struggle for Survival Plays Out Behind Banana Wars

The Scottish Star sits alone at the single dock of this tiny Central American port, waiting for the solitary crane to swing containers of bananas onto its deck.

The entire weekly shipment from Belize’s sole banana port is never enough to fill a single vessel. So before sailing home to Europe, the ship will top off down the coast in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala.

The Guatemalan port makes Big Creek look, at best, quaint. Cranes stack containers into a labyrinth that forklifts navigate on their way to load ships at dozens of docks. Nearby, a statue of a shirtless muscular man with a bunch of bananas slung over his shoulder pays tribute to the busy port’s origins.

The contrast between the two ports reflects the stark difference between the Belizean and Guatemalan banana industries--and as such, captures better than any diplomat’s rhetoric the reasons that the United States and Europe are locked in an arcane banana war that threatens to drag on indefinitely.

The battle has eased off the front pages into quiet conference rooms--”We’re not close to a solution,” says a U.S. trade official in Washington--while U.S. Customs has begun collecting $191 million in retaliatory tariffs against German coffee grinders and French handbags.

But the human stakes in the battle are here, where bananas mean jobs and economic survival.

Guatemala represents one side--the U.S. side, banana-wise. It’s where tropical sunshine and U.S. corporate ingenuity combined to create an industry so efficient that it put the exotic fruit on American breakfast tables long before most people north of Florida knew what a mango or a coconut was. Now that industry is insisting on its unrestricted right to put cheap bananas on Europe’s breakfast tables, too.

Belize, by historical accident, is aligned with the Europeans. The former British Honduras is one of a dozen ex-European colonies that also grow bananas--but not nearly so well as their American-dominated neighbors.

There is the crux of the dispute: the Europeans argue that trying to compete with such efficiency would put ports such as Big Creek and the industry they serve throughout the Caribbean out of business. So Europe gives them favorable treatment.

In this corner of Central America, the conflict is personal enough to affect the lives of men who leave Guatemala’s depressed sugar-cane fields for a better life on Central America’s banana plantations--a reflection of the effect on the entire local economy.

It is so encompassing that it also touches the hemisphere’s battle against illegal drugs and immigration, while inspiring resentment of U.S. policies that are coincidentally penalizing much of the region economically.

If these small countries lose their banana industry, officials warn, their citizens will turn to producing and transporting narcotics in order to make a living. It is a plausible warning, given the region’s recent history in the drug trade.

“When you look at the millions of livelihoods on the line if the banana industry were to fail, you are talking about the destabilization of the Caribbean,” said Zaid Flores, manager of the Belize Banana Growers Assn. “That would certainly be an immigration problem for the United States.”

Clearly, more than bananas is at stake here.

To protect those countries, Europe assigns a quota to the small, mainly Caribbean producers. Those bananas are imported to Europe tariff-free--more than 850,000 tons, or about a quarter of the bananas that Europeans consume. Europe also restricts the amount of imports from other countries and slaps tariffs on them of about $80 a ton.

In an attempt at compromise, Europe offered to raise its limits on total banana imports by 12%, to 3.4 million tons a year, including the tariff-free Caribbean imports.

The World Trade Organization, which has ruled that the EU is violating the rules of international trade, found that proposal unacceptable. In April it gave the U.S. the go-ahead to impose $191 million worth of punitive tariffs on European goods.

For six years, the two sides have tried to find a way out of this dispute. Over the same period, Belize and Guatemala, which share a lush Caribbean coast, have seen their economies battered by the new world trading order that has left many of their traditional industries unable to compete.

The economies of both countries rely heavily on banana exports. But that is where the similarities end.

Guatemala has strong ties to Chiquita Brands International, the Cincinnati-based banana giant that initiated the complaint that led to the dispute. Guatemalan officials insist that globalization cannot be a selective process.

“Globalization has risks and opportunities for all countries,” said Edith de Molina, Guatemala’s deputy minister of economics. “It is not fair to restrict [importation of] the products in which we are efficient.”

Belize counters that Guatemala’s efficiency is based on exploitation. As Jose Alpuche, Belize’s assistant foreign secretary for trade, put it: “Our banana costs a bit more to produce . . . because we pay our labor a decent wage and have decent working conditions.”

Whether in Guatemala or Belize, a job on a banana plantation is considered good work. A pair of men driven years ago from Zacapa, a county in eastern Guatemala, by tumbling sugar and coffee prices are both grateful to be banana workers now.

One man, who gave his name only as Raul, remained in Guatemala and married into a family of banana workers 19 years ago. Since then, he has toiled on steamy plantations in eastern Guatemala.

He works six days a week for $30, nearly double the minimum wage for Guatemalan farm workers. He can earn up to $112 a week with overtime during peak seasons. His family lives in a company-owned four-plex. The two eldest of Raul’s three children attend the company grade school.

“I can raise my family on this pay and on Sundays have time to fish or watch soccer,” said Raul.

Molina estimated that access to the European market would allow Guatemala to generate 30,000 more such jobs in a country where half the work force is jobless or underemployed.

Without family connections, Hugo Hernandez had no hope of getting a job on a Guatemalan banana plantation. Now 32, he ended up in Belize a decade ago, digging irrigation ditches at the 850-acre Mayan King banana plantation. At $72 a week, he was paid even then much more than Raul makes now.

Since then, Hernandez has become a captain supervising 28 people and earning $100 a week. He sends his oldest daughter to public school, and gets every Sunday and every other Saturday off.

Flores estimated that about 35% of the jobs in Belize’s Stann Creek district are in the banana business. Many of the remaining jobs, such as teachers or store clerks, depend on bananas. That is why Belize struggles to maintain an industry that Flores admits is inherently uncompetitive.

Like most Caribbean countries, Belize cannot simply switch to another product. Because this nation of 230,000 people is so small, it will have efficiency problems with anything it produces, said Flores.

The global drive to eliminate trade barriers already has hurt Belize. Citrus, a traditional agricultural forte and job source, has lost ground in the U.S. market to Mexico because the North American Free Trade Agreement gives Mexico better trade terms, Alpuche said.

If pushed out of bananas, Belize could always fall back on another traditional crop. In the mid-1980s, it was the world’s fourth-largest marijuana producer, according to the U.S. State Department.

An aggressive eradication program developed in cooperation with the United States has virtually wiped out Belizean marijuana. Over the last three years, the government also has worked closely with international drug enforcement agencies to curb the transshipment of Colombian cocaine and heroin to the U.S.

Caribbean banana producers are scattered along a major drug transit corridor. About a third of the Colombian cocaine headed toward the U.S. passes through their waters. Along the way, loads are often complemented with locally grown marijuana.

On the sleepy island chain of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where up to 60% of the 120,000 residents traditionally have depended upon banana exports to Europe, many farmers have already begun growing vast plots of marijuana.

“The truth is, America is sending some pretty strongly mixed signals to these islands,” said island group Parliamentarian Ralph Gonsalves.

“On the one hand, Washington says don’t grow marijuana and traffic in cocaine. On the other, they go after the banana tariffs and declare war on the islands’ economic lifeblood. It’s hard to have it both ways.”

Times staff writer Mark Fineman contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Banana Split

The banana war between the United States and Europe has divided Central American and Caribbean nations as well. This map shows banana-producing countries that would profit if the U.S. prevails and those that are now benefiting from preferential treatment by Europe.