The Fruit Hunters Page 23
The company’s ongoing political reach was displayed in the trade dispute that erupted between the United States and the European Union in 1999. When the EU imposed a quota system limiting the amount of bananas imported by Chiquita, the American government intervened on their behalf. This might have had something to do with the fact that Chiquita CEO Carl Lindner had become, at the height of the restrictions on his bananas, one of the biggest political donors in America, bestowing more than 5 million dollars. Senate majority leader Bob Dole was given unlimited use of Lindner’s private jet. Chiquita’s profligacy worked: the U.S. government ended up imposing a 100 percent tax on a number of European products, such as Camembert cheese, cashmere sweaters and luxury handbags. The sanctions served their purpose: the banana quota was lifted and Chiquita emerged with an even greater share of the European market.
Such strong-arm tactics have long dominated international trade. America is the world’s leading food exporter, selling 40 billion dollars’ worth of agricultural exports a year—funded by 20 billion dollars of taxpayer subsidies. Many of these crops are indigenous to countries that now find it cheaper to buy them from the United States rather than to grow their own. Wheat, for example, originates in Iraq—but now America sells it to them. “For the past year [2006], we’ve captured almost three-quarters of the Iraqi wheat market, which is quite large, which is well over three million tons,” said Bob Riemenschneider, the grain and feed director at the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Services. (During the war, Operation Amber Waves saw the distribution of American-bred wheat seeds to Iraqi farmers; regrowing these seeds is illegal as new seeds must be purchased annually.) It’s the same story with corn. On November 5, 1492, members of Christopher Columbus’s team in Cuba came across “a sort of grain they called maiz which was well tasted, bak’d, dry’d, and made into flour.” Now Cuba—alongside the rest of the free world—buys its GM corn from the United States, although ethanol production is raising prices, exacerbating nutritional problems in poorer countries. This flawed system of Western subsidies has allowed for an ongoing flow of capital into developed countries, while eroding the livelihoods of small domestic and foreign farmers who can’t compete with the artificially reduced prices.
This is nothing new: tropical resources have been exploited for the benefit of the North since the mercantilist era. As slaves harvested crops for Europeans, the roots of capitalism and global commerce spread through a damp, dark soil of inequality. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an early anarchist, attributed unfairness to private property. Hobbesian types claim it goes back to humankind’s ancestral territoriality.
Even today, our food stream relies on migrant laborers who live in subhuman conditions. American fruit pickers aren’t farmers or peasants. Many are indentured workers handcuffed by sharecropping agreements. Most of these 1.3 million nomads consider themselves lucky to make minimum wage. They own next to nothing. They have shortened life expectancy. They live in cars, caves and squalid camps full of cardboard tents and plastic sheets. Fruit picking today is “in league with being a rat catcher in Victorian London,” says one economist. Yet without these laborers, the world wouldn’t eat.
However defective the process, at least southern nations are starting to control exports of their produce to developed nations. Sales of exotics have skyrocketed since the 1990s. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, mango consumption tripled from 1990 to 2000. Per capita consumption of papayas increased by 56 percent from 1998 to 1999. Nowadays, it’s becoming common to see cherimoyas, pummelos, passion fruits and Asian pears in our supermarkets. Unfortunately, many of these are also subpar—despite immaculate appearances.
Selling fruits has become a lucrative and essential form of trade, generating millions of dollars for countries with climates well suited to major crops. The volume of the global fruit trade can’t be measured precisely because many countries don’t have accurate assessment systems in place. Around five hundred million tons of fruit are produced annually, generating hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide. Retail produce sales approached 55 billion dollars in the United States alone in 2006. The average American spends roughly two hundred dollars on fruit annually. Because of the reversal of seasons, Chile is now the top supplier of fresh summer fruits to North America and Europe from December to May. According to the Chilean Fresh Fruit Association, fruit exports are a major strategic area in the country’s development.
Other countries vie to specialize in fruits that thrive in their climes. China sells far more apples than any other country; the United States is a distant second. Turkey sells the most cherries, with the United States again in second place. Belgium is number one in pear exports. India, the birthplace of bananas and mangoes, is the export leader in both those fruits, with their market position set to expand now that the United States is importing Alphonsos. Mexico has avocados locked down, but they’ve been petitioning the Indian agreement because it will reduce their percentage of the mango pie.
Morocco produces 450,000 metric tons of mandarins compared to China’s 11 million, yet Morocco (which sells to Europe and North America) makes over 115 million dollars in mandarin exports, while China only makes 85 million dollars (because it sells to developing nations). To put that in perspective, Spain makes over 1.3 billion dollars a year on its 2 million metric tons of mandarin exports.
With billions flying around in fruit crates, governments have long attempted to export more than they import. This system invariably leads to losers. Because developing nations cannot pay as much for imports as developed countries, the deficits to Northern farmers are covered by enormous subsidies. Export-based economies are also wreaking environmental havoc. Consider this: each year, the United Kingdom exports twenty tons of mineral water to Australia, while simultaneously importing twenty-one tons. Wasteful trade, says the New Economic Foundation, is the rule, not the exception. But as the world’s population edges toward 8 billion, the Fragaria Freedom Fighters’ proposed return to idyllic organic practices isn’t likely to offer any solution to the ongoing tragedy of global hunger.
HUMANKIND HAS NEVER been entirely sure how fruits work. Our ancestors were so awed by the occult power of vegetation that they invented magical ways of growing them. Fragments of esoteric farming manuals abound with spells to create fruits without stones, nuts without shells and fruits without blossoms. Dusty alchemical tomes bristled with directions on sprinkling ox blood around young apple trees so they’d grow red apples or how to pour goat’s milk on peach trees so that they’d bear pomegranates. Drilling a hole in a tree and filling it with spices was thought to change the flavor of the fruit. Even Francis “Knowledge Is Power” Bacon believed that watering trees with warm water could induce stoneless fruits. “Of all the signs,” he wrote, “there is none more certain or more noble than that taken from fruits.”
If the future of fruit farming is uncertain, its past is even more confounding. The fertilizer, pesticide and irrigation for ancient man were prayers, offerings and threats—both to the gods and to the plants themselves. Numerous cultures sacrificed humans in order to ensure crops. Others scared trees into bearing fruits. In Malaysia, sorcerers would strike the trunks of durian trees with a hatchet, saying, “Will you now bear fruit or not? If you do not, I shall fell you.” A man in a nearby mangosteen tree would shout back, pretending to be the voice of the durian fruit, “Yes, I will now bear fruit; I beg of you not to fell me.”
We didn’t really understand fruits, but we knew we could mess with them. We also respected—and feared—their powers. The Indonesian Galelareese tribe believed that anyone who ate a fallen fruit would stumble and fall. Eating two bananas growing from the same bunch, they said, would cause a mother to have twins. In other tribal regions, fruits were ceremonially fed to pregnant women to make trees bear abundant crops.
The complexities of soil management have long baffled us. The Earth, with its life-giving vitality, as well as its deathliness, was a convergence of Eros and Thanatos. Peasant women in Eur
ope used to squirt breast milk on soil to encourage it. We’ve fertilized with hair, blood, used wigs, rotting blankets and just about anything else that once lived. One Boston grape grower’s root system was embedded in the decomposing corpse of a circus elephant. Scientists recently uncovered an entire whale skeleton in the soil of a Tuscan vineyard. As late as 1959, farmers in Tanzania still practiced wanyambuda, a fertility rite involving spreading fields with human blood and body parts mashed with seeds. Nowadays, American “residuals management” companies process human waste and sell it in pellet form as fertilizer.
Perhaps the most ghoulish fertilizer ever used on a wide scale was human bones. In the nineteenth century, the frenzy for bones was so acute that British horticulturalists spoke, in all earnestness, of converting “paupers into manure.” Tens of thousands of mummies excavated from Egypt were shipped to England to be ground up and spread on fields. German chemist Justus von Liebig, who later introduced chemical fertilizers, accused Britain of grave-robbing from European battlefields to secure their macabre plant food. “In the year 1827,” he noted, “the importation of carcasses for manure amounted to forty thousand tons.”
At that time, bird droppings—called guano—were, alongside corpses, the most valuable fertilizer around. Large amounts of seagull squiggles were found on small islands near the coast of Peru in the middle of the nineteenth century. The “Guano War” between America and Peru flared up in 1852. At that point, the price of guano hovered around $73 a ton. (As I write this chapter, a barrel of oil costs $72.80.) The Guano Act of 1856 gave U.S. citizens the right to claim uninhabited islands for use in guano extraction. In the 1860s, Spain declared war on Chile and Peru. The shit storm abated only with the advent of artificial nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium.
SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT on December 3, 1984, the leaves started falling from the trees in Bhopal, India. The town’s inhabitants, coughing badly, awoke to the sound of neighbors screaming. The streets rapidly filled with people fainting, throwing up frothy blood and having miscarriages. “It felt like somebody had filled our bodies up with red chilis,” is how survivor Champa Devi Shukla described it.
The worst chemical disaster ever, the Bhopal tragedy resulted in over ten thousand deaths. Hundreds of thousands were injured. Birth defects, disabilities, diseases and pollution paralyze the region to this day. The ensuing investigation determined that the catastrophe was caused by a leak of methyl isocyanate, an ingredient used to manufacture carbamate pesticides at the nearby Union Carbide factory.
Many of the chemicals used on our fruits were initially developed to be nerve gases and other weapons during World War II. To stay operational, the factories producing wartime chemicals redirected their concoctions into fruit crops. Although they’ve proven formidable in helping plants overcome adversaries, their use in our food stream continues to be a cause of dissent.
Pesticide manufacturers claim that their products are safe for consumption, but rarely substantiate their claims with any tangible evidence. On the contrary, independent studies link the chemicals on our fruits to cancers, birth defects, sterility, Parkinsons, asthma, disrupted hormones and a host of other grim diseases. Because these toxins affect human nervous systems and neurochemistry, they are especially unsafe for children, says the National Academy of Sciences. They proliferate in our sperm and ovaries, affecting our reproductive development. Pesticides are found in North American mothers’ milk. The American Journal of Epidemiology has established a connection between residential pesticide use and breast cancer.
Nobody knows exactly how these chemicals react inside of us because they’re often released without any studies. The 1976 Toxic Substances Act stipulates that chemical compounds only need to undergo testing if “evidence for potential harm exists.” This is infrequently the case, because most chemicals are released on the market so quickly and with so little public knowledge. All pesticides must be registered with the Environmental Protection Agency, but, as the Environmental Working Group warns, “Because the toxic effects of pesticides are worrisome, not well understood, or in some cases completely unstudied, shoppers are wise to minimize exposure to pesticides whenever possible.” Ninety percent of new compounds are granted restriction-free approval. National Geographic reports that “only a quarter of the 82,000 chemicals in use in the U.S. have ever been tested for toxicity.” There’s no transparency with synthetic inputs: they’re never listed as ingredients.
It’s indisputable that conventional fruits contain traces of hazardous poisons: small doses may be harmless but large amounts are often lethal. From the Bhopal disaster to the military use of herbicides like Agent Orange, agricultural chemicals have taken countless lives.
The names of pesticides like Bravo, Monitor, Champ and Goal have a school-yard innocence that belies these precision snipers’ deadly effects. Miticides target mites; herbicides decimate weeds; fungicides murder molds; and rodenticides snuff out small animals. Systemics are chemicals that course through the entire tree: roots, trunk, limbs, branches, sap, flowers, fruits and seeds. Then we eat them. A recent study found thirty-seven different chemicals in a conventional apple. The fruits that retain the most pesticides are those whose rinds or skins are eaten. Conventional strawberries, peaches and raspberries are chemical sponges.
The American Association of Poison Control Centers Toxic Exposure Surveillance System reported 6,442 pesticide exposures in 2003, the majority of which were unintentional. One thousand six hundred ninety-five patients were treated in emergency rooms and 16 fatalities were reported. When patients vomit organophosphate pesticides, ER rooms are instructed to treat the liquid as a “hazardous chemical spill.”
Organophosphate pesticides are used on 71.6 percent of apples, 59.6 percent of cherries, 37.2 percent of pears and 27.1 percent of grapes. They break down quickly in the environment, but overexposure can lead to blurred vision, difficulty walking and death. Hydrogen cyanamide is a toxin that can induce nausea, vomiting and parasympathetic hyperactivity. It is used by farmers to achieve uniformity on grapes, cherries, kiwis and other fruits. Methyl parathion is a 1950s neurotoxin that short-circuits insect nervous systems—and can similarly affect humans. Like an edible Taser, it feels like getting hit on your funny bone over and over again, except on your whole body. Until child-safety legislation was passed in 2000, it was all over fruits. Although its use has been diminished, we’re still eating it in vegetables, presumably because cooking reduces its toxicity.
It often takes decades of damage before a “miracle plant food” like DDT finally gets phased out. Beaurocracy is indolent by nature; the chemical lobby does its utmost to slow things down even more; and conventional farmers just want to fight off pests as long as they can. Azinphos-methyl (AZM) has been sprayed on apples, blueberries, cherries and pears since the 1950s. “This pesticide has put thousands of workers at risk of serious illness every year,” says Erik Nicholson of the United Farmworkers of America. In 2006, the Environmental Pro tection Agency announced that it would try to phase out the use of AZM by 2010.
Others remain at large. Dieldrin is such a persistent pesticide that some scientists predict it will still exist in the environment when humans are extinct. Methyl bromide causes respiratory illnesses, convulsions and acute mania, alongside intensely depleting ozone levels, yet U.S. agribusiness forces have managed repeatedly to delay its banning, citing emergency “critical uses” stipulations in the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Supposed to be totally eliminated by 2005, it is still used on strawberries. Mass sprayings of Round Up—Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide—have endangered human health and wiped out myriad flora and fauna. (It is a weapon of choice in the war on drugs, and is used in aerial sprayings to eradicate poppy plantations in Afghanistan and coca crops in Central America). It is categorized with “noncarcinogenicity for humans” in the United States, despite studies linking it to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, genetic damage and reproductive problems.
In 2007, a Los Angeles j
ury awarded 3.2 million dollars to six Nicaraguan farmworkers who claimed they were made sterile as a result of spraying DBCP while working for Dole Food. In similar cases in Nicaraguan courts, Dole and other companies have been ordered to pay more than 600 million dollars to workers allegedly affected by the use of the pesticide, although the companies maintain that the judgment is unenforceable because the law that allowed the workers to bring the lawsuits is unconstitutional.
In Europe, new regulations concerning the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) are forcing companies to provide data proving the safety of their products. They face stiff resistance from chemical manufacturers. But there should be more transparency regarding the toxins all around us. If manufacturers are so sure there is nothing wrong with genetically modified foods, pesticides and cloned meats, they should have no problems labeling them as such. After all, cancer will kill one in every two men and one in every three women now alive, reports Samuel Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition.
Like our ancestors, we act in ways that will bemuse future societies. The military-industrial complex lubricates the mass-agriculture system with fossil fuels. Tons of heavy metals and other hazardous, even radioactive, waste is sprayed on American agricultural soil. In the 1990s, manufacturers in Quincy, Washington, intentionally sold toxic industrial waste to farmers as fertilizer, causing an eruption of cancers, brain tumors and pulmonary disease. Farmers in India recently started spraying their cotton and chili fields with Coca-Cola. They say it kills pests just as well as chemicals but costs less. In India, reports Vandana Shiva, tens of thousands of debt-ridden farmers have committed suicide, many by drinking pesticides.
In the late 1990s, scientists investigated the phenomenon of longan trees producing fruits totally out of season. The trees they studied were located near temples where fireworks were used in religious ceremonies. It turns out that gunpowder in the firecrackers induces blossoming. Now most longan plantations use chlorates—gunpowder—as fertilizer. As a result, residue has already started building up in soils and leaching contamination into nearby ground water. In 1999, forty Thai longan farmers died when their fertilizer warehouse ignited and blew up like a roman candle.