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Things are moving fast here in Costa Rica much like to exportation of Dole bananas from Costa Rica to countries all over the world. We only had three days at the center before we went on our first field trip to the Manu Field Station, which included a visit to a farm and the Dole Banana Plantation on September 10th. Here’s a fun fact I learned: bananas take 18 days to get from the field and production plant to the grocery store and your plates and approximately 153 million boxes of bananas were sold by Dole in 2010. Carlos, one of the workers at the plantation, gave us a memorized lecture on the history and production of bananas with three points for every topic.

After, we walked into the field. With dole, bananas are grown as a monocrop and there were thousands of bananas. Dole produces these bananas by taking the trunk of a plant and cloning the tree for 100 new crops. This is cheap and allows the plantation to get 100 of trees from one tree. Although this may seem profitable, there are many environmental effects and risks. First, banana plantations have to cut down forests to grow bananas so Costa Rica is loosing forest and biodiversity to this industry, approximately 42,591 Ha in the entire country. This process of monocropping and cloning puts the entire area at risk for pests and disease, which could wipe out the entire plant. Also, tropical soil is very old so it is poor in nutrients so every two or three years, the land of the banana plantation is useless and the plantation has to be moved to a different location. To protect the bananas from being attacked by pests, each bundle of fruits has a plastic bag over it, embedded with chemical pesticides. Also, the field is sprayed with fungicides 40 to 60 times in ten months. Workers in plain uniforms, which have numbers and letters to identify them, harvest the bananas and move the bananas along to the production plant with the help of donkeys and a metal cable.

The bananas are then broken apart and put into water to float to the various stations. Water is used to clean the bananas and minimize bruising. Workers apply alum, a chemical, to seal the fruit for transportation around the world and are packaged in bags and boxes. Water runoff from the plant can affect local water supply, fish populations and ecosystems. Many of the workers are in contact with chemicals that can increase risk of cancer, sterility and allergies and are not always given proper equipment to handle these chemicals. Workers are paid $46 to $70 dollars a week and are mostly immigrants from Nicaragua or El Salvador. Although bananas appear to be a huge economic boost, most companies are multinational and the profit is leaving the country within the higher paying jobs and even among production workers who come into Costa Rica to harvest for the season.

From this visit to the plantation, I got a real look into how many of our products; both food and materialistic items are made. It really stressed to me the importance of buying local food and goods. Without a reduction in demand for bananas, the 4^th most consumed food in the world; Costa Rica cannot easily reduce their production in a sustainable way.

Location: Manu, Costa Rica