Sterile bananas, sterile men

Below is an excerpt from The New Community Project's weekly NCP Globalization List email.

Speaking of spraying, in the environmental class I'm teaching just now at Elizabethtown College, we were talking about the fact that to keep producing cavendish bananas (the variety we and the EU prefer)--a mutant, sterile banana reproduced from cuttings--each crop has to be sprayed 40 times to beat back plant diseases. One outcome is that 1 in 5 male banana workers in Central America is sterile and female workers suffer increased leukemia and birth defects.

"But if we stopped buying them," remarked one student, "the workers would be out of jobs." True enough--but the best thing that could happen to poor workers in banana-growing regions would be for the corporations to have to pull up stakes and go home, turning the land back over to the locals for (healthy) food production--for themselves.