Banana and Rights: An Inquiry into Human Rights practices in the Latin American Banana Industry

Details

Supervisors

Desmet, Carlos

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Today, the banana industry operates on a global scale. Indeed, Westerners eat this fruit every day, and it is part of the subsistence diet in many tropical countries. In our supermarkets, we can find bananas from Latin America, Asia and Africa all year round at prices that are affordable or even low for our purchasing power. However, the 'insignificant' act of buying bananas can have disastrous consequences. The vast majority of bananas consumed are not fair trade, and are produced and harvested at the expense of respect for the human rights of many workers. The heat, exposure to pesticides, wages that do not provide a decent standard of living, harassment at work and the absence of employment contracts are just some of the human rights violations. In this report, we interviewed 14 players in the Latin American banana industry, including NGOs, labels, producers and trade unions, with the aim of learning more about these human rights violations, seeing what the future challenges were and whether any efforts had been made in recent years. Our aim was also to find out what were the causes of these human rights violations and whether they could be prevented. It was also crucial to look at the responsibilities of each player in the industry: consumers, producers, governments, trade unions, NGOs and the major multinationals. In this report, we attempt to answer these difficult questions.