Don't buy Bananas from Mexico is helping the Drug cartel.
Answer:
I appreciate your concern and I’m not going to pretend I’m super informed about the complexities of the drug cartel. But I do know about our bananas and our options so I can give you information on that.
We get bananas from Mexico and Ecuador, but mostly from Mexico and we don’t have a choice when we buy them. They come from a label called Organics Unlimited under their GROW label (stands for Giving Resources and Opportunities to Workers.) The GROW program provides grants to non-profits in the communities where the bananas are grown to initiatives most supporting children in health and education. While not actually a Fair Trade program, the model is similar where there is a small surcharge on every case of GROW bananas and that surcharge goes to the grants.
In July you may have noticed that we had a bunch of different labels of bananas for a week or so. There was a tropical storm that hit Mexico’s main banana growing region and our distributors had to sub in different labels while they waited for boats to arrive from Ecuador with more GROW Bananas. (Mexican bananas come by truck and Ecuadorian bananas come by boat.) During this time we relaxed our buying standards. While we got as many GROW cases as we could, we also had some by another socially responsible label called One and also bananas from Del Monte and Dole. This is the first time I’ve put Del Monte or Dole bananas on the shelf in my time as a produce manager. These corporations don’t line up with the values of the Co-op but since we had no other options on a handful of days that’s what we brought in.
In my dream world we would carry Equal Exchange bananas since they are Fair Trade certified and grown by small farmer cooperatives but our distributors have had a hard time incorporating them into their banana programs.
In the end, people eat bananas, and Mexican farmers grow them and we do our best to bring bananas to the co-op that have the most positive impact on the people of those communities and the land that they tend.
Produce Manager
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