"TWO ECONOMIES COME FACE TO FACE:BANANA PLANTATIONS TRANSFORM THE LANDSCAPE"

By Gerardo Alfaro,
Fundación Güilombé

For many decades in Costa Rica and in all of Latin America, politicians, intellectuals, technicians and promoters have visualized rural populations and their surrounding environment as cold objects of study or as simple targets of their policies. The promotion of modernization, development, progress and civilization policies was justified in this supposed backward world. They covered up, with less than good intentions, the fact that these humble inhabitants were rooted in ancestral cultures carriers of knowledge and productive practices that move with the forces of Mother Jungle, and that generally, they are in balance with them.

This caused the proliferation of myths regarding the superiority of the urban-industrial-capitalist world over the rural world, and the superiority of Occidental science and technology, over these local knowledges and practices. Education and technical extension campaigns were promoted in the means of mass communication. In these, all this beautiful magical-natural world of the countryside was ridiculed, as a way to create conditions to promote repeated policies of "modernization of agriculture", which has not been more than simply a process of dismantling peasant and local traditional economies, and their productive and life practices, in order to give way to the concentration of thousands of hectares in hands of transnational companies, along with the simultaneous impulse of productive practices based on monocultures and chemical agriculture. This implied the destruction of vast ecosystems of tropical humid forests, the impoverishment, proletarianization and/or peasantification of thousands of rural families, and loss of food security of these families and of their countries.
This article hopes to describe the characteristics of these two antagonistic worlds and to suggest possible explanations about how the world of markets imposes itself upon the "natural" economies, and how this has caused a radical change, in only a few years, in the natural and human landscape in the majority of the rural scenarios of the Costa Rican Caribbean. We will take the case of the expansion of the banana industry towards the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s as an example.

Monoculture versus organic bananas

It is important to conceptualize what we understand by these two economies, as this will help us understand the process of transformation of space to which the monoculture of banana is taking Costa Rica.

The open market natural economies are those peasant economies in which the families depend more on the exchange of resources and energy with the ecosystems, and less with the exchange of merchandise in the national market. On the contrary, the economies open only to capitalist market carry out a minimum exchange of energy and resources with the ecosystems, but do carry out a strong exchange of merchandise with the markets.

In the process of imposition of the latter over the former, as is the case of the expansion of banana monocultures, this is the key that explains how this transformation of the human and natural landscape as lived in the Costa Rican Caribbean in the last years occurs.

The strategy of imposition of the market economies over the economies based on the exchange with Nature has been based on:

1. Press and educational campaigns regarding the economy and society of Costa Rica, trying to dislodge the ancestral dialogue among the traditional population, its productive and life practices and the forces and resources of Mother Nature that surrounds them. Peasant knowledge is ridiculed, regarding aspects of climate prediction, soil management, management of ecogeographic units, cycles of flowering-fruiting-reproduction of tree species, plants, insects, birds, animals, cultivation practices related with the lunar phases, curing with botanical remedies, animal husbandry, association of crops, etc. The official agronomists, until recently, looked down on the peasants who still practiced their naturalist knowledge.

2. The promotion of agrarian policies conducive to placing traditional producers at a disadvantage when faced with markets, by fixing the prices of their products, by increasing the prices of agricultural inputs, by not providing basic services such as roads, transportation, markets, health, etc.

3. The promotion of policies which favor large transnational companies producers of bananas, pineapples, etc. with the aim of pressuring the small traditional producers to sell their lands, or for the use of the few zones still with forest ecosystems, in order to cut them down.

This was the context in which transnational companies such as Standard Fruit Company, Chiquita Brands, Banacol and other pressured the Government at the beginning of the 1990s to promote a Plan of Banana Promotion. This plan gave them great fiscal and tributary benefits, favorable exchange rates policies, authorization to use new lands, deregulation in environmental and labor norms, freedom to eliminate workers Unions pressures by means of implementing pro-management Solidarismo.

Under this plan, in the early 1990s, there was a massive, aggressive and uncontrolled expansion of banana monocultures, at the expense of displacing small diversified farms of thousands of small traditional producers in the forest regions where they co-inhabited harmoniously.

This process brought on the transformation of a human-natural landscape with banana production in the midst of tropical agro-ecosystems immersed in Black, Indigenous and Mestizo Peasant cultures, to a landscape characterized by the deterioration of the balances of ecosystems, and banana workers and their families with a very low quality of life.

Green Gold or "Green Hell"

The uncontrolled expansion of banana monocultures in the Caribbean promoted by large transnational companies in the last 10 years, is recognized today as a radical change of Dantesque dimensions, in the natural and agrarian, ecological and human landscape! Those happy and healthy peasants with their small farms, resembling beautiful diversified gardens that dominated much of the area along the Saopin Highway to Limon, in Matina, Cuba Creek, Siquirres during the first years of the 1990s, were erased with one sweep, and replaced with a hideous landscape, an interminable sea of banana plantations, tattered banana workers with sad faces, women and children with pale semblances and anguished by the psychological pressures of this green hell. Where are those little houses surrounded by dense forests, cacao crops where the monkeys and birds, and butterflies lived? Annihilated! For ever, annihilated by the greediness of powerful Mr. Banana Dollar.

We have only taken the recent expansion of banana plantations as an example of these processes, however, this history is but the last link in a process that historically began 100 years ago in the Atlantic. We can imagine now the dimensions of the changes that the "green gold" has had on our original Caribbean of a Black cadence, mixed with the whispers of the interminable chants of the Bribris or Cabecars, spiced with the Mestizos, and having as a backdrop the gigantic, shady magical tropical forests that our valiant and combative writer Carlos Luis Fallas Sibaja (Calufa) described in his book "Mamita Yunai", when the banana plantations only were beginning to transform this natural landscape.

To conclude, this landscape is the one that dominates today in the majority of the Caribbean regions of Costa Rica; it is a model of exploitation that erodes, contaminates and violates the biodiversity of the planet, including human life.

TWO ADVERSARY CONCEPTIONS:
CARIBBEAN TROPICAL GARDEN VS BANANA MONOCULTURE:

Caribbean Tropical Garden

The central social actors are the peasant families (mestizo-black-indigenous), carriers of ancestral knowledge and naturalist practices. 2.Bananas are cultivated under forest shade cover with up to five vegetational levels (they are veritable domesticated tropical forests), within the agroecosystem of the tropical garden of Talamanca: mixture of trees, crops, medicinal plants and an enormous biodiversity of flora and fauna in equilibrium. 3.Low density of crops combined with other crops: keeps the richness of the soil. 4.Selection and natural cure of seeds that are most adapted, and that promote genetic diversity and generate natural resistance against "pests" and diseases. 5.Use of lands with moderate inclines which take advantage of the natural drainage and avoid fungal diseases. 6.The fertility of the soil is maintained by a recycling of organic matter, the optimum use of solar illumination and of the soil. Moreover, green manures, vegetable cover and compost are used. 7.The workers are the owners of the means and the products, there being a just and dignified relation with work, providing a healthier life. 8.A vital relationship of co-existence and rootedness is established with Mother Earth. 9.Because these families come from a mystic dialogue with Mother Tropical Jungle (whose occult and eternal message is: "Be ye diverse"), they apply a management of the farm based on a strategy of multiple use of the natural resources and ways to appropriate them. In such a way that the farm becomes a mosaic agro-ecosystem where everything is mixed with everything (bananas with cacao, coffee with wood trees, fruit trees for firewood, medicinal plants, tubers, insects, birds, animals, human beings, etc.), in a great holistic equilibrium. The absence of a rupture between Human Being and Nature in the process of work with the environment, implies the presence of a great emotional equilibrium. In this way, the natural and balanced landscape of the small Caribbean farms and their people, offers us an unmeasurable benefit by any economistic calculation: a profound psychic equilibrium!

Banana Monoculture

1.Systems of production where the main social actors are the banana entrepreneurs (owners of the means of production and merchandise); on a second plane, the banana workers, uprooted from their link to the land and their ethnoecological ancestral knowledge, and subject to the exploitation of their work, intoxicated by agrochemicals, in the midst of an unhealthy environment, unbalanced, and without a real quality of life. 2.The system of production is carried out by the planting of enormous extensions, resulting in the erosion and total elimination of the biodiversity. This model of plantation is used by the large companies, both in conventional plantations, as well as in supposedly alternative plantations, in which only a few of the poisons are avoided. 3.Indiscriminate use of poisons in the form of insecticides, nematicides, fungicides and herbicides, which cause disasters in the ecosystems even in places far away from the point of contact. 4.Methods and practices of aerial fumigation, highly contaminant of air and water sources. Many of the communities around the banana plantations are very affected. 5.Deforestation on the margins of the rivers, speeding up problems of sedimentation. 6.Death of animal life where the contaminated canals discharge their waters. 7.Deforestation and erosion of extensive regions considered to be a sample on the most rich biodiversity of the planet. 8.Acute, as well as chronic damages to the health of workers of the banana plantations. 9.Thousands of tons of plastic wastes, such as bags (impregnated with insecticides), boxes and ropes, as well as thousands of tons of organic wastes which often end up in the nearby rivers. 10.The production and commercialization of export bananas are in the hands of three companies that control 60 percent of the world market. 11.Violation of labor union rights and environmental rights of workers. 12.This system of production comes from a break between Humans and Nature, implying a break of the workers with themselves (negative self image and self esteem), and a break, consequently, with the rest of the fellow workers. This implies profound emotional imbalances which generally pass through the workers, generating acute problems of alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, delinquency, violence, and family instability and disintegration. This is the daily world in which the banana worker and his family lives! The monotonous landscape of the omnipresent banana greenery, the foul smelling gutters, the stench of poison, garbage scattered about everywhere, the buzzards, the houses each one like the next, each quadrant like the other, each banana plantation like the rest, all contribute to a psychologically asphyxiating environment lived and expressed by the worker and his family day to day, and which forms part of this infernal game of rupture and self negation.