13 JULY 2002: “IN ECUADOR’S
BANANA FIELDS, CHILD LABOR IS KEY TO PROFITS.”
A group of 10- and 11-year-old
boys outside an
Ecuadorean banana plantation
where they work.
Child labor has endured
in Latin America
despite efforts to abolish
it.
FROM THE
NEW YORK TIMES:
July 13, 2002
In Ecuador’s Banana Fields,
Child Labor Is Key to Profits
By JUAN FORERO
PUERTO INCA, Ecuador At
Los Álamos plantation, it would appear that no expense was spared
to produce the Bonita brand Cavendish bananas sold in the United States.
The modern 3,000-acre hacienda
in this steamy corner of Ecuador, one of the most efficient in Latin America,
employs some 1,300 workers to tend banana plants fed by a state-of-the-art
irrigation system.
The owner is Álvaro
Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man and a worldly bon vivant. He has become the
leading candidate for president with the help of a slick marketing campaign
that has cast him as a populist friend of the poor. “I love the workers
at Los Álamos,” Mr. Noboa told local reporters in May, when he announced
his candidacy.
But in interviews, a dozen
children and many adults spoke of child laborers at Los Álamos,
among them a spindly-armed 10-year-old, Esteban Menéndez. “I come
here after school and I work here all day,” Esteban said. “I have to work
to help my father, to help him make money.”
The presence of children
on the plantation of a man who may win Ecuador’s presidential election
in October is one of the more glaring examples of how enduring the use
of child labor remains in Latin America, where some 42
million children from ages 5 to 14 have been estimated to be working
in recent years.
The problem has been made
more durable still by the competition that comes with a consolidated global
market. Pressures on businesses to be efficient and profitable are often
passed on to the world’s most vulnerable population, its poorest children.
Growers and exporters here,
who supply 25 percent of the bananas eaten in the United States, say the
product earns them about 30 percent less today than a decade ago, often
prompting them to turn a blind eye to labor codes. Child labor is common
on plantations, large and small.
Meanwhile, grim economic
realities leave families more than ready to send their boys, and sometimes
girls, out to work, even if it means pulling them out of school and placing
them in fields or factories where they are exposed to hazardous conditions
for little or no pay.
For two years, Esteban and
his family say, the boy has bounded up 15-foot banana plants, tying insecticide-laced
cords between them to stabilize trunks that might otherwise collapse under
the weight of the produce that is behind Mr. Noboa’s fortune of over $1
billion.
He works for nothing to help
his father, who tends 98 acres, avoid having his pay docked.
“That is the life of my sons,
working in the bananas at such a young age,” said Esteban’s mother, Benita
Menéndez, 36, who has had three sons working at Mr. Noboa’s plantation,
only one of them an adult. “I did not want them to work when they were
little, but this is the reality.”
Ecuador’s problem is less
severe than that of other countries in the region. Even so, the International
Labor Organization estimated that 69,000 children ages 10 to 14, and an
additional 325,000 young people ages 15 to 19, were working here in 1999.
Only a significant increase
in wages, at best a distant prospect in a country where the average worker
earns $5.74 a day, will keep families from sending their children out into
the fields, labor advocates here and in the United States say.
But while rights activists
regard such labor as unacceptable, many parents like Mr. and Mrs. Menéndez
see it as a necessity.
When several plantations,
fearing unwanted attention, dismissed their child workers after a damning
114-page report in April by Human Rights Watch, the action was taken as
a disaster by families across the lush banana belt of southern Ecuador
the world’s largest banana exporter and an increasingly important source
for American corporations like Dole and Del Monte, according to the report.
“They fired all the children,
but the work they did helped us,” complained María Narváez,
31, whose two sons, Néstor and Luis Boa, 12 and 13, were dismissed
from a big hacienda where they earned $3 a day. “The situation is such
that we all have to pitch in.”
At Los Álamos, which
supplies the world’s fourth-largest banana company, labor conditions have
become increasingly contentious. Employees’ efforts to organize for better
wages and working conditions led to a violent standoff this year a dispute
that simmers today in the form of an intermittent strike by some families,
including Esteban’s own.
The workers unionized in
March. The company responded by dismissing more than 120 of them.
When the workers occupied
part of the hacienda, guards armed with shotguns, some wearing hoods, arrived
at 2 a.m. on May 16, according to workers, and fired on some who had refused
to move from the entrance gate, wounding two.
The guards, workers said,
then entered the grounds and burst into barracks where other workers were
sleeping and forced them out.
The next afternoon, workers
again gathered at the gate, where they parked a bus across the road to
block delivery trucks. The guards confronted them again, this time wounding
seven more including Esteban’s father, Bernabé Menéndez
and a policeman.
“It was an attack on innocent
people,” said Jan Nimmo, a Scottish labor advocate who was with the workers
that day and videotaped the afternoon confrontation at the gate.
Mr. Noboa’s lawyer, Rafael
Pino, attributed the violence to the workers, saying the guards had been
sent in to protect property that was being vandalized. “At no moment were
there shots from our side,” he said.
But the violence prompted
the United States Embassy to ask the government to ensure the safety of
the striking workers. An American delegation that included two members
of Congressional staffs visited Los Álamos workers in June.
“This is sort of the underbelly
of globalization,” said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat
who sent an aide to Ecuador.
“We ask for labor protections
and we ask for environmental protections,” Mr. Miller said, “and we’re
told we can’t have them, and when the citizens of that country try to get
those protections, they’re met with force from the company to keep that
from happening.”
After the confrontation at
Los Álamos, a Chicago-based labor rights group, the U.S./Labor Education
in the Americas Project, began pressing Costco, a distributor of Bonita
bananas, to lean on Mr. Noboa to improve labor conditions.
Under pressure, his banana
company has promised to improve medical services, provide masks, gloves
and other equipment and settle complaints about unpaid overtime wages.
But it has refused to recognize the workers’ unions, Labor Ministry officials
said.
Mr. Noboa, who divides much
of his time between Guayaquil and New York, declined to be interviewed,
and campaign aides did not return phone calls and e-mail messages seeking
comment. But his lawyer, Mr. Pino, said children under 14, who are tightly
restricted from working under Ecuador’s labor laws, did not work at Los
Álamos. “Impossible,” he said in an interview. “To violate the law
cannot be done, and it is not the company policy either.”
Though no one knows exactly
how many children work on the large plantations across Ecuador, Sergio
Seminario, an analyst and former president of the Association of Banana
Exporters, estimated 6,000, with thousands more working on small family
farms.
The Labor Ministry has long
been aware of the problem in the industry, which accounts for 20 percent
of Ecuador’s exports. But Alberto Montalvo, the highest-ranking ministry
official in this region, said it was difficult to root out. “We all believe
in human rights and labor rights,” he said. “It is all very beautiful,
but we also have to recognize that all the members of families have to
work to pay for basic needs.”
The existence of child labor
on plantations is a product of simple arithmetic. Workers receive so little
in part because the wholesalers and retailers abroad reap most of the profits,
particularly with the recent consolidation of huge retail outlets like
Wal-Mart, Costco and Carrefour.
Each 43-pound box of bananas
purchased here by exporters for $2 or $3 goes for $25 in the United States
or Europe. The Ecuadorean grower makes 12 cents on the dollar, according
to the National Association of Banana Growers. “These big chains say, `We
will buy your bananas off the boat, but at our price,’ ” Mr. Seminario
said. “So the exporter has learned that to sell to those chains he must
sell at their price.”
If the growers are squeezed,
the banana workers feel the pain. Their work force is almost entirely nonunion,
and workers are often deliberately shifted from one payroll to another
by growers who set up multiple companies on paper to avoid paying benefits
and higher wages.
The workers and their children
here said difficult conditions had long been the norm at Los Álamos.
The families who live here in Puerto Inca cram themselves into crude cinder-block
houses with tin roofs. Indoor plumbing is rare.
The main earners among several
families said they received $6 to $7 a day within Ecuador’s minimum wage
of $128 a month but were often expected to work six or seven days a week,
failing to earn the overtime pay set by law.
The monthly minimum they
earn falls far short of the $220 the government says a poor family of four
needs to meet basic needs, so children go to work.
“With my husband’s salary,
we did not have enough for school, not enough for food,” said Patricia
Céspedes, explaining why she had pulled her nephew out of school
at age 11 and sent him to work at Mr. Noboa’s hacienda. The boy, Máximo
Gómez, whom Ms. Céspedes has raised since his mother’s death,
is now 14 and a veteran field hand.
Esteban goes to school in
addition to working. But many families say they earn so little that they
must choose which of their children to educate and which to send into the
factories and fields. Such economic necessity keeps 55 percent of Ecuadorean
children from attending secondary school, the World Bank says.
Mr. Noboa remains a frequent
visitor to New York, where, according to his spokesman, Pablo Martínez,
he mingles with the Rockefellers and other luminaries. When his son was
christened at St. Patrick’s Cathedral last year, an event shown on Ecuadorean
television, Robert Kennedy Jr. served as the godfather.
But Mr. Noboa’s great hope
is to reach the presidency, which he failed to win in 1998. Mr. Noboa has
portrayed himself as an outsider whose policies will improve life for most
Ecuadoreans.
He has made no extensive
public remarks about the dispute with the workers at Los Álamos.
In fact, the poor labor conditions and the existence of child workers have
made barely a political ripple here. An investigation of the shootings
at Los Álamos has not led to any arrests, nor has it shed light
on what happened.
Mr. Noboa’s aides say the
troubles on his hacienda are politically motivated efforts to embarrass
him in the midst of a presidential campaign.
“If he wasn’t running for
president and wasn’t the richest man in Ecuador, this wouldn’t be happening,”
Mr. Martínez said.
