lorax

Ooh, you're talking slave wages. Commercial bananas are grown on plantations; for Chiquita to break even on Hacienda 25, for example (this is 500 ha or 1235 acres of bananas) they need to sell at $2.50-3.00 a case bare minimum. Hacienda 25 grows exclusively Gran Nains. On Hacienda 18, which grows plantains, they need to get $4.00 a case to break even. These are the bananas that you see in your markets up there. The daily wage of a Chiquita plantation worker is $5.00 US based on a 12-hour day; H25 employs about 100 workers.


For a smallholder, they need to be able to sell each raceme for at least $1.00 on the "common" varieties (Cav, Gran Nain, Seda, Orito), $1.50 for the "specialty" varieties (Rosado, Maqueño, Limon), and $3.00 for plantains, both verde and maduro. Most of the domestic bananas are grown this way, and all of the "specialty" bananas that are exported by Chiquita and Dole also come from smallholdings.

To give you an idea of the markup locally, I can, at the weekend fresh market, purchase a raceme of Oritos from the producer for $1.50, or I can buy a single hand from a reseller for the same price. A raceme of Oritos is generally 8-10 hands. This is in Quito, where bananas are not generally grown. If I go to a fresh market in Santo Domingo, which is the point of harvest, the price goes down about 50 cents.