FARMING AND FORESTS

Agriculture is the principal agent of ecosystem destruction and species loss. Food production uses more land and freshwater than any other human activity. The desperate need to feed the world's population is bringing mankind face to face with the reality that large-scale industrial farming comes at the expense of tropical forest survival. This crisis faces us at a time when multinational companies are bogged down in a morass of corporate scandals. Verifiable corporate environmental and social responsibility seems like a distant dream. Traditional institutions - including many governments in developing countries - struggle for legitimacy. The World Trade Organization, for example, is in peril of sinking under the combined weight of intransigent agricultural protectionism in the rich world and a frustrating inability to integrate environmental and social imperatives into free trade rules.

It is welcome news, then, when Chiquita Brands International - the former notorious United Fruit Company, and still the largest single agricultural employer in Latin America -- forges a pact with a maverick conservation activist group, the Rainforest Alliance, to guarantee, through a tough on-the-ground certification process, that environmental and labor practices are unquestionably improving. Chiquita has now certified all of its owned farms. "Better Banana" certification with the Rainforest Alliance, gave the company courage subsequently to sign a pioneering labor agreement with astoundingly transparent benchmarks built in. This book by Gary Taylor and Patricia Scharlin tells the remarkable story through objective professional analysis and clear-eyed interviews with executives, activists, workers and a range of international labor advocates in the U.S., Central America and Europe It is a hopeful story of corporate reform and mutual trust in a world and in a region where such examples are in short supply. We begin to see that if governments can't or won't protect the environment and safeguard workers' rights, informed consumers can and, increasingly, are.