Rainforest Alliance Failing Plantation Workers

Abstract

6 | International Union Rights | 23/4 FOCUS | CERTIFICATION AND LABELLING Rainforest Alliance Failing Plantation Workers Earlier this year discount supermarkets Aldi and Lidl announced their intention to source the majority of their tropical fruit from Rainforest Alliance (RA) certified suppliers. This move has thrown into focus the question of whether the claims of sustainability that come with the green frog logo can be met at the low prices which consumers have come to expect from these and other hard discounting supermarkets. In particular, the extent to which RA upholds labour rights or ensures that plantation workers earn anything close to a Living Wage. Banana Link, as part of the Make Fruit Fair! Campaign recently published a report, Rainforest Alliance and the Discount Supermarkets: Low Prices and Easy Standards?1, which looks at the standards and verification systems used by RA and at the realities of daily life on RA certified banana, pineapple and tea plantations. The report concludes, among other things, that RA standards in respect of recognition of trade union rights and compliance with minimum wage requirements, are not met on many RA certified banana and pineapple plantations in Latin America or tea plantations in Indonesia and Kenya. For several years, many supermarkets have sold Fairtrade and organic certified products offering very tangible benefits for producers, including a guaranteed minimum price for their produce that meets the costs of sustainable production. Plantation workers also benefit from Fairtrade’s Hired Labour Standard, which guarantees the rights of workers to freely organise and to collectively bargain, along with more control for workers over how to spend the Fairtrade premium – a communal fund for workers and farmers to use – as they see fit – to improve their social, economic and environmental conditions. Fairtrade International is also introducing a new methodology to set Living Wage benchmarks and a clear process for plantations to progress towards a Living Wage. For this, consumers can pay higher prices to support systems of production in which workers and the environment are treated more fairly and with greater care. However, in most supermarkets, these products represent only a very small percentage of total sales and the majority of consumers choose to buy ‘conventional’ bananas and pineapples which are almost invariably very much cheaper. With the recent announcements by Aldi and Lidl that all fruit, not already labelled Fairtrade, approximately 85 percent, will be certified by the RA, comes the implied claim that cheap fruit can also deliver sustainability. Rainforest Alliance certification Founded in 1987, the RA was, from the outset, focused on the environmental - its main remit being to save the rainforest and to counter the spread of agriculture and commercial logging in virgin forests. Use of the RA label has since expanded rapidly, particularly in coffee, cocoa, tea and bananas since 2010. Around 1 million metric tonnes of bananas were certified in 2010. Today over 6 million tonnes display the green frog logo, meaning that 5.5 percent of world banana exports were RA certified in 2014. To qualify for the green frog logo, producers need to comply with 100 criteria, grouped into ten guiding principles, set by the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), of which two - Principle 5: Fair Treatment and Good Working Conditions for Workers and Principle 6: Occupational Health and Safety – relate to labour standards. However, the rapid expansion of RA certification has invited a growing suspicion that much of its success can be attributed to the laxity of the standards themselves and the undemanding nature of the RA certification process. And, as our report illustrates, RA standards include criteria that are difficult to test or are fulfilled easily because they are very much open to interpretation, while the auditing of certified farms is open to compromise, when all the parties involved have a financial or other interest in the outcome. Enter the hard discounters The hard discounters have been growing well since the 2008 financial crisis and by 2014 they had captured 17 percent of the EU retail market. Their challenge to other more traditional supermarkets has been to offer hard-pressed consumers even lower prices than those offered by the already highly competitive supermarkets. As prices paid by consumers declined, so prices paid to...