YOU CAN FIND Dole organic bananas in stores across the United States. Yet Dole is an agribiz giant. Are their bananas really organic? To find out, I contacted Denny Gibson, head buyer for Puget Consumers Co-op (PCC), the largest consumer-owned food co-op in America, with 40,000 members and seven stores. Generally, Denny said, he buys organic bananas from Quinta, a medium-sized grower in southern Ecuador that produces flavorsome and creamy textured bananas, grown in rich, fertile organic soil.
However, when Quintas aren’t available, Denny said he gets his organic bananas from Dole—the largest supplier of organic bananas to the United States. Because of Dole’s historical record as a chemically oriented agribusiness giant, the co-op members challenged Denny about this. So he and his wife Monica decided to tour several big banana suppliers in South America, including the Dole organic banana plantation in Manabi, Ecuador. Here’s what he found:
Overall, we felt the plantation was well organized, the employees had a clean and safe working environment, and the administrators expressed a commitment to organic farming methods, fair treatment of their employees, and protection of the natural environment. Granted, it was a one-day visit, we aren’t soil scientists, and we didn’t have a chance to interview the employees. Industry insiders claim Dole executives have said publicly they really ‘don’t believe’ in the organic ‘fad,’ and that Dole imports every [farming] input possible instead of making it locally, which doesn’t support sustainable agriculture. But what we saw was quite positive compared to what most people might imagine from a multinational corporation.
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