"Bananas are the most popular fruit in the world – shoppers spend more than £10bn on them annually, and they are the world's fourth most important crop after rice, wheat and maize.

Banana production is consequently an operation on a gigantic industrial scale and is dominated by just five huge companies, Chiquita (formerly United Fruit), Dole, Del Monte, Noboa and Fyffes, which control 80 per cent of the global trade between them.

They grow bananas in vast monoculture plantations in tropical countries, employing tens of thousands of workers. But, according to the Fairtrade Foundation, many of the workers are paid pittance wages insufficient to provide for their families – less than £1 per day in some cases – for working long hours in very difficult conditions, and often prevented from forming trade unions to protect their rights and improve their working lives."

Michael McCarthy, Environmental Editor, The Independent

from "The Big Question: Why are bananas so cheap, and what does it mean for producers?"

http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/big-question/the-big-question-why-are-bananas-so-cheap-and--what-does-it-mean-for-producers-1798207.html

In basic theology, there are two types of evil (some may call it sin).  One is personal evil, the type of thing that one person does, like envy, theft, or murder.  The second is called systemic evil.  It occurs when an entire society engages in behaviors which harm others.

So what do you do if you know your society engages in behaviors which harm others?



"He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord."  Proverbs 17:15

"If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them."  James 4:17


If the system is evil, and everything I do that supports the system also supports that evil, the only way to end the evil is to opt out of the system and work to undo it.

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens.  If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone.  Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

Bill Mollison

If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry, and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.  

Isaiah 58:9-10