Bananas

I've noticed throughout the trip that our host family always has at least 50 bananas around the kitchen every day. Some are green, some are birght yellow, and others are purely brown. We have them every day for breakfast with a little bit of honey which makes them taste even better. Carmen also uses whole banana slices for desert in jello. I had the absolute best banana bread ever at the Chiquita plantation, too. It was warm and you could definitely tell that it was picked straight off the tree. Bananas are so rich, fresh, and flavorful here in Costa Rica that it is going to be hard to start eating the bananas we get back in the U.S.

Unlike Chiquita, many of the banana plantations here in Costa Rica are very bad for the environment. They cut down acres of land for the fields, and pesticide runoff gets into streams, rivers, oceans, soil, and eventually into humans and animals. Workers are not paid well, nor are they equipped with the proper equiptment or training to handle the banans or pesticides safely. Our instructor Glenn mentioned that a lot of times you will see pesticide cans laying on the ground at the ends of the fields. Clearly, there needs to be an improvement in the safety regulation of banana plantations. Currently, there are a number of organiztions working toward this goal, including the Emaus Forum, the Commission of Human Rights in Central America (CODEHUCA), and EUROBAN. The Emaus Forum has worked to halt the uncontrolled expansion of the banana industry which was destroying rainforests, as well as working to improve working conditions in certain plantations around Costa Rica and promote organic production. The Comission of human rights has also been working to improve working conditions and to protect employees' health through unions and labor organizations. EUROBAN is a European group of organizations that are concerned with banana production and fair trade within Latin American countries. Despite many of these organizations efforts, much more still needs to be done regarding banana production. The U.S. and other large countries hav a huge voice because they are the main consumers of all of these bananas. people should be educated about which banana companies are good and which are bad so that we can force the bad companies to improve their conditions.