Jamaica was the first commercial producer of bananas in the Western Hemisphere and the industry is an iconic part of Jamaica's cultural and economic history.

Diane Abbott

It inspired Jamaica's most internationally famous folk song (Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song), one of its most well-known poems (Evan Jones's The Song of the Banana Man) and at the height of the industry, bananas were Jamaica's largest single export by value.

The industry still employs more than 10,000 people and accounts for $26 million of Jamaica's Gross Domestic Product. But the end of preferential access to European markets has threatened the industry with extinction. Competing with the "dollar", bananas produced by near slave labour in South America seems impossible.

But the islands of the Eastern Caribbean seemed to have discovered a way to save their industry. They have repositioned their bananas as a niche Fairtrade product. This way they can charge a premium. Furthermore the premium can be as much as 25% higher than the market price. And earlier this year Britain's second largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury's, announced that all the bananas it sells from now on will be Fairtrade bananas.
Because Sainsbury's sell over 1,000 bananas a minute, that is a huge amount of bananas, they have committed to buying 75% of St Lucia's banana export crop, 80% of Dominica's and much of the production of the other Windward Islands.

Sir John Compton, the 82-year-old premier of St Lucia, told Justin King, the head of Sainsbury's: "You have saved the banana farmers of St Lucia." And the prime minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit, travelled to Britain in February in order to explain to British MPs how much the Fairtrade scheme had done for his country's banana industry. He said "What Fairtrade has done for us is ensure that the social stability of our country is maintained; that poor people particularly in rural communities can enjoy a better standard of living as a result of a committed price in the UK market."

One of the distinctive features of the Fairtrade scheme is that, not only do farmers get a high fixed price, but they are also paid a "social premium" which must go back into community development. The Dominican prime minister spoke about this aspect to British MPs in glowing terms, "We now have young people who are coming into banana production who before could not be attracted to the industry. It is also due in part to the social premium to which the farmers have access. What better way to promote democracy in third world countries than allowing people to take on the leadership, management and the implementation of projects and programmes in those countries?

In Dominica's case you can go to every single community and see the impact of the social premiums on farmers. The government takes no part in deciding which project farmers fund, how it is implemented, who is contracted to do it and who is employed on it. It is left entirely to the farmers to decide it.

So you have somebody who is illiterate but is able to sit in a meeting and contributes to a decision that will assist a particular school or build a playing field or basketball court. It is amazing to see the joy and sense of achievement among those poor farmers as a result of the social premium that Fairtrade offers them.
We have to understand that not one cent goes into the farmers' pockets directly. Every dollar or cent that is received goes straight into the communities. In our case over the past few years we have received well over US$2.3 million, which has been spent across the country.

The islands of the Eastern Caribbean have repositioned their bananas as a niche Fairtrade product.

One can understand the tremendous positive impact that that has had on various communities. That is one of the reasons why I am a strong advocate of Fairtrade.

The Fairtrade concept runs counter to the accepted wisdom in the British supermarket business. For years the assumption was that the shopper wanted to by basic foodstuffs at the cheapest possible price. But retailers like Sainsbury's have proved that shoppers will happily pay a premium price for some agricultural products. Why this should particularly apply to bananas is not clear. It may be part of general increased consumer awareness of environmental issues. Most bananas are fed to children, and it may be that doting British mothers are prepared to pay a little extra to feed their children the best. And there is no doubt that Caribbean bananas simply taste better.

Evan Jones's poem, The Song of the Banana Man, has a refrain "By God and my big right hand, I will live and die a banana man".
It could be that repositioning Jamaica's bananas as a niche product may be the way to save the industry and enable thousands of rural Jamaicans to continue to live and die as proud producers of high quality fruit.

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