Make Bananas Fair!

The Fairtrade Foundation has launched the new campaign Make Bananas Fair asking the UK public to help end the supermarket price wars, including a petition asking the government to urgently step in and investigate the impact of retailer pricing practices.

As part of the campaign, a new report called Britain’s Bruising Banana Wars reveals that, in the past ten years, the UK supermarket sector has almost halved the shelf price of loose bananas while the cost of producing them has doubled. Typically, 11p is paid for a loose banana compared with 18p a decade ago, while a loose apple grown in the UK now costs 20p. Meanwhile living costs for banana farmers and workers in the three countries that provide 70% of the UK’s bananas - Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador - have rocketed – by 85%, 350% and 240% respectively.
 

To accompany the report, the Fairtrade Foundation commissioned the Ethical Consumer Research Association to conduct research to score retail practice in a Supermarket Scorecard. Retailers were ranked using a methodology that draws on the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental good practice, with an added benchmark of transparency of information about their banana supply chains. Though the Co-operative, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, which all source 100% Fairtrade bananas, emerge more positively than other supermarkets from the scoring, the Foundation says no retailer can afford to be complacent. 

The ECRA research reveals that when it comes to the economics of the supply chain, supermarkets need to initiate change which ensures that all banana farmers and workers are always paid sustainable costs of production and living wages, in order to deliver a truly fair and sustainable banana industry. Bananas have been a Fairtrade success story: one in three bananas sold in the UK is Fairtrade. The full report is available here. More information is available from the Fairtrade Foundation.