The current debate that seems to be dominating SGA is the fate of Chiquita bananas on our campus. There have been talks, petitions and student demonstrations, but each day in the dining halls, the only option seems to still be “bad” bananas, or no bananas.
After interviewing Juan Pablo Pacheco ’14, the Chair of Diversity and Equity, and Elias Kauders ’12, the Chair of Environmental Affairs, the most telling quote to surface from the debate comes from Kauders. When describing how he and other students want to get Turbana bananas, fair trade bananas grown in humane and environmentally friendly conditions, back in our dining halls, and to have the dining halls never serve Chiquita, he said, “It should be a minor transition, but it probably won’t be.”
Kauders made that statement a week and a half ago, and it proved to be true. The issue started when, upon returning to Conn after the summer, students noticed to their dismay that the dining halls were serving Chiquita bananas, even though two years ago there was an agreement between students and dining services that Chiquita would no longer be served if there was a “better” option available.
That agreement was made after Forest Justice and a group of unaffiliated students held talks and circulated a petition stating that they no longer wanted Chiquita to be served, and that dining services should look into another option. After some searching, Turbana bananas were chosen and, during the 2009-2010 academic year, the transition from Chiquita to Turbana was so smooth that few students even noticed.
Problems arose, however, because Turbana bananas were purchased from the vendor Fresh Point, which provides the school with fair trade and local fruit. During summers and breaks, when the number of students on campus decreases, the demand for fruit drops sharply, and the school cannot make large enough orders to purchase fruit from Fresh Point. Because of this, the school had to switch to another vendor who can accommodate smaller orders, but this vendor only offers bananas from non-fair trade companies, such as Chiquita and Dole.
Chiquita has a long history of human rights and environmental abuse. In 1928 the United Fruit Company (which became Chiquita in 1984) responded to a month-long worker strike with violence, culminating in one of the largest massacres in the history of Colombia. In 2007, Chiquita was fined 25 million dollars for funding terrorist organizations between 1997 and 2004 to protect their land. There are still complaints coming out of Latin America about how Chiquita and Dole treat workers unfairly and poison the local environments with pesticides banned in the US and Europe.
I have heard many students complain that there are many other issues to focus on. Our clothes come from sweatshops, the minerals used in our cell phones come from mines in the Congo, and almost all the fruit we eat is probably picked by people paid unfairly low wages. Why should we focus on bananas?
The debate about bananas is not just because bananas are “bad” or worse than anything else we consume, but because two years ago, students made it clear that they no longer wanted Chiquita bananas to be served. With the help of dining services we found a solution to that problem, but now we have regressed, and this time around instead of a relatively seamless transition that few students noticed, a debate has broken out across campus about whether it is fair for SGA to tell dining services that they cannot purchase a specific item.
SGA is not trying to get rid of all bananas, even though rumors have been circulating saying that that is the goal. Right now Kauders and Pacheco’s main concern is to educate students as to why Chiquita bananas are not the best option, to make students conscious consumers who are aware of the consequences of their actions when they decide what to consume. Sure, there are other things that they could be focusing on, but when we already had a solution worked out, and we know that the solution caused little if any disruption to banana consumption two years ago, why would we not implement that solution once again? •
