Bananas!* (2009) is a documentary about Dole food company being found liable, in an LA courtroom in 2007, for malice and misconduct. No surprise, they got that reversed. (Yeah, like a group of poisoned banana farmers from Nicaragua could win against a billion dollar multinational. Disney puts all the happy endings in their movies, not in their news programs.)
Bananas!* At Any Cost?
Just as Bananas!* was set to open at the LA Film Festival, Dole threatened to sue everyone involved in the production and presentation of the film. Plucky Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten decided that, if they were going to sue him and try to silence his film, he would capture it all on film. The result is the nail-biting and inspiring new film Big Boys Go Bananas!* (2011).
Big Boys Go Bananas!*
As I sat down to watch my reviewer’s copy of the film, a friend offered me a banana. “Is it Dole?” She thought it might be Chiquita. I lamented (whined, blew hot air), “That’s no better.” I prefer my banana growers unpoisoned and fairly paid. As described in the film Big Boys Go Bananas!*, (and reminiscent of stories of corporate news-hijacking discussed in another fine new doc, Shadows of Liberty) Chiquita got an apology from the Cincinnati Enquirer for its 18-page 1998 exposé of how “Chiquita exposed entire communities to dangerous U.S.-banned pesticides, forced the eviction of an entire Honduran village at gunpoint, suppressed unions and paid a fortune to U.S. politicians to influence trade policy.”
Dan Koeppel, journalist and author of Banana: The Fate of The Fruit That Changed The World, says in Big Boys Go Bananas!* “We have an astounding lack of curiosity, the journalism community in the US; a lack of skepticism.”
During the Hot Docs film festival earlier this month, I interviewed the unassuming Gertten. I asked him what he made of this lack of curiosity. Gertten told me his Canadian producer of Bananas!*, Bart Simpson (also of The Corporation), “couldn’t get people interested in this story. [People thought it was]…too heavy… too much …Maybe it’s too dangerous.”
What has changed since Bananas!* [the first film] came out?
In my own country they say that Fair Trade bananas has more than doubled. In that sense, the Fair Trade farmers have better conditions than before. The conventional bananas are produced as they have always been produced, under a cloud of chemicals—one third of the production costs of conventional bananas is for chemicals. So my film, in that sense, hasn’t changed anything for the banana workers. What I did for the banana workers in Nicaragua is, they have fought for a long time to tell their stories to the world. I told their story.
Are things like the Occupy movement and Fair Trade making an impact?
The people who created the financial crisis are still in power…My new film is partly about the PR industry…When a big corporation has a PR crisis, they do everything they can to turn the story around. Can you imagine how much the banks are spending on PR over the last five years! And you can’t follow that money. Because, you read an op-ed in a big newspaper here in Toronto signed by some professor; that op-ed could be written by some PR company and paid for by a bank. And everybody’s hunting away with their microphones to interview the professor, but he’s actually just sending out a paid message from the most powerful people in the nation. And if we could follow that money, if the PR business was transparent, we could see, “OK yeah, but you’re talking—these guys are paying you.” Then we would listen to him in a different way. And that doesn’t happen. So, in these times when journalists are losing self-confidence and losing jobs, and the PR industry is growing and making more money than ever, I think we need to legislate about transparency. If they don’t want to be transparent by free will, then we have to ask for it.
Both films are playing in Toronto this week at Bloor Cinema.
For more information on the films, see http://www.bananasthemovie.com/ and http://www.bigboysgonebananas.com/about
Please read the published portion of my interview for more about why Gertten thinks a documentary about a banana company might be considered “dangerous”. Post City www.postcity.com/Eat-Shop-Do/Do/May-2012/Now-playing-Indie-filmmaker-Fredrik-Gertten-takes-on-food-giant-Dole-He-tells-us-why/
Now go enjoy a Fair Trade banana.
Haven’t eaten a banana in months – diet reasons. Good to know that I am also inadvertently not supporting evil corporate behemoths. (Tweeted from my iPad 2 while I sip a mochacino at Starbucks.)
For the last 25 years, Equal Exchange has been working to offer an alternative to the multinationals by sourcing coffee, chocolate, tea, and bananas directly form small scale farmer cooperatatives. Bananas are more difficult and challenging than the other products to source alternatively, but the alternative they are combating makes it that much sweeter. http://www.beyondthepeel.com/
Thank you for the inside perspective, Jessica; and keep up the good work!
Every banana eater (of the human variety) should watch the short videos at http://www.beyondthepeel.com/resources.html to see and appreciate how bananas are ethically farmed and delivered to market.
North of the border, find out where you can buy Fair Trade bananas in Quebec and Ontario at http://www.equicosta.com (In Toronto, at Big Carrot, Karma Co-op, and Noah’s.) Can anyone tell me where people in Atlantic and western Canada can get ethically produced bananas?
Pacific side, Discovery Organics brings small farmer fair trade bananas into CA, the NW and Western Canada. Equicosta bring small farmer fair trade bananas to the areas you mentioned. Equal Exchange brings small farmer fair trade bananas to the East Coast from Maine down to Virginia and over to MN / WI / MI area. Hope that helps! These 3 organizations are all independent, small organizations that work directly with only small scale farmers. Not all fair traders are created equal: http://www.equalexchange.coop/small-farmer-campaign
Mil gracias! Discovery Organics
And here’s some more good reading:
Fair trade bananas: Avoiding the high costs of cheap food
Fair Trade: A Better Deal (teacher resource for Grade 9 Social Studies: Interdependence: Atlantic Canada in the Global Community)