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The United Fruit Company has been defunct for almost a century by now.
I still recommend buying fair trade Bananas if you can afford it, but eating a banana helps poor people in third world countries more than eating an apple, which doesn't send a single cent to the third world.
And second, why does the OP consider eating bananas exploiting banana farmers, but eating apples is not exploiting apple farmers??
Edit: thanks for the downvotes you dumb fascists.
I actually grew up in a banana producing country. All the leftists shitting on our produce are enemies of the people. People in poor third world countries desperately need money and selling their produce is how they earn money.
Yes, buy fair trade, that actually gives a better price to those farmers. But even without fair trade, buying tropical products helps tropical farmers.
UFC is just chiquita now it's the first sentence on wiki
Buying bananas to help people in developing countries is like shopping at Walmart to help the employees. The vast majority of that money isn’t going to them.
That's really short sighted and screws over people.
With any product, the vast majority of money goes to rich capitalists.
But for a banana farmer, all their money comes from selling bananas. Sure, short term they could switch to manioc or rice or tobacco or some other tropical produce, but if no one buys those products, they have no income.
Longer term, they try to give their kids education so that the next generation will not be banana farmers, but that's only possible if they have enough money to send kids to school.
Buying fair trade Bananas is the best thing we can do to help them, aside from charity. Buying normal bananas is the second best thing that can be done.
Because bananas are grown in third world countries where many mega corps are controlling many aspects of the food growing and trading.
While apple farmers, you can litterally go pick them yourself by the price set by the farmer.
This is more nuanced than that, but that's the gist.
Buying from shitty companies that exploit a country won't help people on that country.
Those companies do not inject money on the cities they enter. They bribe politicians for advantages, destroy the natural resources, and go as close to slave work as they can while paying no taxes.
The point is in no way is a cheap banana in new York, in the winter, a proper reflection of the "fair cost it should be" for the farmer who worked to make it
OP didn't mention apples.
Which tells you how large of an impact they had if their legacy is still with us.
Are the apple farmers living and working in a third world country? Getting as little as possible?
Yeah pretty sure it's mostly racism that makes people assume all banana producing countries are run by rich white men, also the assumption that people in those countries don't want to engage in trade like everyone else does.
Reality is bananas are currently cheap because they grow well and transport easily, also because cargo is very cheap thanks to giant shipping containers. The same reason goods made in the rest of the world are available to people in banana farms - the fact no one has any reason to doubt you're from a banana producing country is testament to the benefit two way trade has made us all. Your phone is probably newer than mine, you can use it to look up all the same information and entertainment as me living in one of the most colonialist countries - things have changed so much for the better and pretending it hasn't is a major flaw in a lot of people's thinking at the moment.
And of course that doesn't change history but moving forward is far more important than whatever it is the people angry at bananas want us to worry about.