BETTER BANANA

The Rainforest Alliance, founded in New York in 1986, started life with a novel idea: to help address conservation and development in tropical forests by convincing private owners to let Alliance experts assess forest harvest practice according to a set of tough principles and then award a certification which would be honored by knowledgeable buyers. Outreach in Costa Rica led them to go beyond forests and into agriculture Once there, though, they saw that the aggressive expansion of the big three American banana companies Chiquita, Del Monte and Dole was threatening the integrity of the remaining rainforest, already severely decimated by cattle ranching. The Alliance became convinced that their certification approach for tropical forest management could be applied equally well to banana cultivation. They named the program "Better Banana." Then, they had to convince the huge, secretive and typically hostile banana companies that it was an idea "so practical it's radical," their memorable motto.

By the early 1990s, the international conservation community was raising the cry over the rapid loss of rainforests and the diverse plant and animal life intrinsic to them. At the same time, certain leaders in the Catholic Church, and other local activists in Costa Rica were organizing protests against the rapid expansion of banana plantations that were meant to meet expected demand in the newly consolidated markets under the European Union. Customers longing for fresh fruit in Eastern Europe were also available with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Meanwhile, the European Union mounted a protectionist trade regime of quotas, tariffs and licenses designed to honor obligations to former colonial countries in Africa and the Caribbean. As the illustration shows, using postcard campaigns, labor rights activists and political consumers in Europe lined up behind the regime against the so-called "dollar" banana companies. Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte found themselves up against a phalanx of forces severely jeopardizing their ambitious plans and the huge amount of capital borrowed for the expansion.

Avoiding a colonialist approach by working with local university experts and activists, the Rainforest Alliance developed a set of environmental, health and safety principles and practices for banana farming. But only Chiquita actually took the plunge and contracted with the Alliance to begin to certify some pilot farms to Better Banana. This was a very risky move for both organizations: purist conservationists criticized the Alliance for working with companies and Chiquita had to reverse a hundred years of defensive monopolistic arrogance by letting conservationists onto its farms, ultimately committing some $20 million to major infrastructure improvements. Twelve years later, all of Chiquita's owned farms had been certified and the company was well on its way to certifying even independent farmers it buys from. The certification model also leveraged a social certification process for labor relations, when Chiquita signed a pioneering pact with regional banana and the main international food workers' unions. The company also developed an amazingly candid voluntary reporting program going light years beyond its rivals and beyond the vast majority of multinational companies. Critics of both Chiquita and the Rainforest Alliance have largely turned their attention elsewhere. The company finally turned the corner after bankruptcy and reorganization, and astonished many observers by sustaining its "core values" and social responsibility programs through this crucial period. Chiquita's prospects soared when the World Trade Organization finally ruled the EU's protectionist trade policy illegal. With its debt under control, the company could now go after the profitable European market in earnest. Wall Street has responded, pushing the company's stock up in a hopeful trajectory. Better Banana truly triggered a transformation.