Fair Bananas: Farmers, Workers, and Consumers Strive to Change an Industry (review)

Fair Bananas documents the tumultuous history of the banana industry and analyzes how the fair trade system attempts to rectify the unequal terms of trade and lack of effective collective bargaining that has plagued the banana industry. The majority of academic work on fair trade focuses on the coffee industry; however in this book we are introduced to new challenges for the fair trade movement, most notably, the difficulties that accompany a perishable commodity and certifying products from both small farms and large plantations. Henry Frundt argues that to increase fairness in the banana industry it is necessary for the interests of banana producers, their supporters and consumers to all be understood and addressed.

The author does an excellent job of giving the reader a complete picture of the past history and current state of the banana industry. Frundt begins with a chapter explaining the history of banana production in Latin America and the Caribbean, and then details the various players in the game: unions, associations, NGOs and Trans-National Corporations. This background precedes the main theoretical chapter of the book which situates the discussion within social movement theory. Banana workers, NGO members and conscious consumers have been provided an opportunity to introduce fairness into the banana industry, they now need to use networks to entrench the fair trade ideology within all parties, and finally, a collective identity is necessary to sustain involvement. Frundt uses these social movement concepts to unpack how the banana industry has arrived at a place where fair trade has a chance to drastically improve the lives of banana workers.

Frundt documents the struggles of banana workers' desire for unionization and the ability to engage in collective bargaining. The network of banana workers, unions and NGOs expanded throughout Latin America and the African, Caribbean and Pacific banana-producing countries, and the fairness identity started to coalesce around the environmental and safety issues of high levels of pesticide use and dangerous working conditions. In 1997, Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International introduced Fair Trade-certified bananas, and in addition to environmental issues, banana workers' desires for fair wages and the right to association became part of the fair bananas identity. The author argues in chapter 12 that freedom of association is the most important issue that banana unions have fought to obtain and consequently one of the most important contributions to fairness that the fair trade system can provide. Frundt concludes that that an alliance between banana farmers, powerful banana worker unions and the fair trade system has the potential to meet the major challenges of the banana industry, specifically "price, union monitoring, consumer education, retailer pressure, smallholder technology, and Fair Trade coordination."(220)

The arguments in the book are supported through in-depth interviews and the compellation of relevant secondary quantitative data. The social movement theoretical approach of opportunity, networks and identity is an effective mechanism for presenting the thesis of the book. By focusing on opportunities, networks and identity, Frundt shows readers the difficulty in creating a fair banana industry, but also highlights how fair trade provides the best chance for helping some of the most marginalized workers in the world.

I enjoyed this book. Before he launches into the discussion of fair trade and the current state of the banana industry, Frundt provides the reader with a detailed, but not tedious history of the banana industry. Therefore, readers who are not intimately familiar with the banana industry can become acquainted with it before learning about how fair trade is attempting to transform the industry. This book is a useful read for those who are interested primarily in fair trade, but also for those whose main interests lie within the banana industry. The chapters are organized around different substantive issues including history of the industry, the actors involved in the industry, the influence of unions, banana production in the Caribbean, fair trade and freedom of association. The chapter on fair trade...