Going Bananas Over Injustice

Inflation hasn't seemed to affect the price of this exotic (non-native) fruit at our nearby Food Lion.

"Listen! Hear the cries of the wages of your field hands. These are the wages you stole from those who harvested your fields. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of heavenly forces. You have lived a self-satisfying life on this earth, a life of luxury. You have stuffed your hearts in preparation for the day of slaughter." 

James 5:4-5 (CEB)

Have you ever wondered why we pay less for imported bananas than any other item in the produce section of our supermarkets? Or why we have to pay up to four times as much for apples or peaches, among the native products available (though even those are also often imported from distant countries)? 

One obvious reason is that wages and other operating costs are far lower than those in the US. If we grew and marketed bananas here, the price would be far higher, even in cases where migrant workers are employed.

Sam Funkhouser, Princeton seminary graduate and member of an Old German Baptist group in Edinburg, in a keynote address at a November 15, 2025, workshop I attended, asked the question, "How many of the goods and products we take for granted could we afford if all who worked to make them possible were paid the wages we would expect for ourselves?"

Including bananas.

An informative article in the Wikipedia on "banana republics" describes some Central American and other countries as follows:

A banana republic is a country with an economy of state capitalism, where the country is operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class. Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites.The ruling class controls the primary sector of the economy by exploiting labor. Such exploitation is enabled by collusion between the state and favored economic monopolies, in which the profit, derived from the private exploitation of public lands, is private property. At the same time, the debts incurred thereby are the financial responsibility of the public treasury. Therefore, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile oligarchy that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.... By the 1930s, the United Fruit Company owned 1,400,000 hectares (3.5 million acres) of land in Central America and the Caribbean. 

Honduras and Guatemala are cited in the article as two examples of countries in which US corporations like the United Fruit Company (now Chiquitas), and the Standard Fruit Company (now Dole) gained and have maintained major economic and political control over their host nations, often with the clandestine help of CIA and other US agencies that helped overturn governments they saw as getting in their way.

Even in Costa Rica, one of the more democratic Central American nations, Dole and other powerful corporations have managed to gain possession of huge amounts of land to make it one of the largest producers of pineapples in the world. Member of my oldest brother's family who live in the Pital region in the northeast part of the country have witnessed firsthand the takeover of hundreds of acres of good agricultural land for pineapple production. This was obtained by Del Monte from subsistence farmers who were promised good employment and a better life if they sold their property to the company. The result has been heavy truck traffic causing harm to local roads, the exploitation of local workers and a marked increase in drug use in the community. 

To the extent that we all benefit we are also all complicit.