don’t slip on the skin
I like bananas. I don’t love them and I try to eat one-a-day principally as I think they do me good.
The other day I bought a bunch of, admittedly, small ones and they cost me 60p, 10p per banana. I don’t mind admitting that I grew up in more austere times than today and bananas were undoubtedly a truly exotic treat. So much so, I remember going round to Alan Hargreaves’ house in the late 60s and his mother made us all a banana-butty for our tea and they were brilliant. It was as if each banana had been personally handpicked picked from the headdress of Carmen Miranda!
But how did bananas get to be just 10p? A quarter the cost of a Kit Kat. A tenth of the cost of a family sized bag of crisps. They are even half the price of an apple grown in this country, when they have to be shipped half-way round the world courtesy of the largest container ships. The Fairtrade Foundation blames a bitter & aggressive price war that has seen supermarkets almost half the price of bananas over the last ten years, whilst the cost of production has more than doubled. And guess who suffers? Pay and living standards in the producing countries of Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Equador, have plummeted and the majority of producers are now losing money. Meanwhile, Tesco admitted that it made a loss on every banana sold. So, in the perfect storm of this free-market economy no-one’s winning and everyone’s losing. Go figure. Time to support the Fairtrade Foundation me-thinks.
