Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [31]
Banana Hunger
Six months after we moved to California, I decided that I had to begin traveling in the third world. Since his teenage years Joe had spent a great deal of time in the third world, especially Latin America. I had been only to Mexico and Guatemala, and then only briefly. I wanted to experience firsthand what I had been studying for so many years.
I chose the Philippines because the United States has particular responsibility for the underdevelopment of that country. The Philippines was once a colony of the United States and has been heavily influenced by U.S. political, military, and corporate ties. During the five years after President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, U.S. military and economic aid to the Philippines leaped fivefold. In the fiscal year 1982 budget, this aid was scheduled to top $110 million—not including rent for military bases, a disguised form of aid.3
For years I had read and written about U.S. corporate invasion of third world economies. I wanted to see, hear, and touch the impact of that economic force. For years I had read about grassroots resistance to brutal domination by landed elites. I wanted to meet people who were part of that resistance. What did they want? Were they full of hate and anger? Could they accept people like me as allies, or did they see all North Americans as enemies?
I traveled to the Philippines with my buddy Eleanor McCallie, a founder of Earthwork/Center for Rural Studies, also based in San Francisco. Together we learned about underdevelopment in a way that no statistics could ever convey.
Multinational corporations such as Del Monte and Castle and Cook (Dole) tell us that their investments create the wealth and foreign exchange which the Philippines needs to import essential goods; they’re the “engines of development,” according to the multinational corporations. We visited the products of their interventions—giant banana plantations they have developed in the southern Philippines over the last ten years.
We met workers paid less than $1.50 a day for back-breaking work, sometimes 12 to 14 hours a day. We went inside their living quarters and tried to imagine what it would be like to live with 24 other women in a room not much bigger than my living room back home, with a small curtain over each woman’s bunk providing her only privacy. The bunks were simply hard wooden platforms.
A pregnant woman showed us a large, raw wound on her leg. This, she said, was where another worker had accidentally sprayed her with the fungicide used on the bananas. For the first time we became aware of the terrible danger of pesticides everywhere. Besides the pesticides sprayed regularly on each banana tree and the fungicide sprayed on each bunch as it is packed, planes spray the entire plantation from the air twice a month. Water supplies are left uncovered. The workers are not protected, or even given any warning. In fact, we were told pesticide planes have been used to break up the meetings of workers attempting to organize an effective union.
To Del Monte and Dole, this is development. But development for whom? Small farmers had worked the land for over a generation, yet, as is common in the third world, they had no legal title to it. This made it easier for the corporations to move in. They simply made deals with wealthy local owners of the best banana land. Once these big landowners saw they could make money by producing bananas for Del Monte, Dole, or Standard Brands, they pushed the poor, small farmers off the land, using bribes, false promises of great jobs on the plantations, legal maneuvers, and finally brutal force.
Most of the dispossessed could not get any kind of job on the plantations. Many ended up even worse off