Bananas and Development

The banana industry has created a structural limitation on the developmental options of areas surrounding the plantations. This structural limitation is expressed in what we at Foro Emaús call “the cycle of poverty”: boys and girls who are born in the banana plantations, sons and daughters of banana workers' families, hardly have the option of elementary school and occasionally a few years of high school, and due to economic necessity, they have no choice but to move from youth to working in the banana fields. The conditions that reproduce this cycle of poverty are embedded within system: the options for employment are limited if not completely non-existant, there is almost no possibility of acquiring one's own plot of land, there is practically no access to opportunities for technical or higher studies, the surrounding infrastructure is very limited, the roads are usually in very bad condition (generally they are unpaved), there is bad or nonexistant transportation service, the health services are very limited...All of these factors contribute to a social landscape whose only features are poverty and social exclusion. In its more than one hundred years of existance, although it has an almost absolute economic and productive prominence in the area, the banana industry has not been able to generate a dynamic social environment that allows people to move past the conditions of poverty and marginalization in which the population has and continues to live. The Ministry of National Planning in Costa Rica published data in 1999 that reflects this reality: the banana municipalities throughout the country possessed the lowest indices of social development. For example, while in the Central Valley—the region with the highest socioeconomic development—some municipalities possessed the highest Indices of Social Development (ISD) between 90 and 100, there are municipalities like Talamanca (IDS: 0), Matina (IDS: 22.6), Sarapiqui (IDS: 28.5), and Siquirres (IDS: 36.4), situated in the Atlantic Region, where the locations with lowest indices are located.