Top Banana Peels Out of Costa Rica

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA-Chiquita bananas leave a bad taste in the mouths of Costa Ricans these days.

Carrying out a longstanding program to convert their Costa Rican banana holdings to african palm production, United Brands-producer of the Chiquita banana-recently laid off some 3,000 workers on its plantations in southwestern Costa Rica. Production of African palm requires about one-third the labor of banana production. By changing over to palm production, United Brands, the world's top banana seller in 1980, is breaking an agreement with the Costa Rican government to use a certain percentage of its land holdings to grow bananas through the year 2000.

To the surprise of both the company and the government, banana workers stood fast against the measure. On July 9, about 1000 fired workers and their families began a peaceful occupation of 5000 acres of company land. The campesinos, members of the Federation of Costa Rican Farmers and Campesinos, are demanding that the government give them parcels of land to farm and immediately expropriate United Brands' holdings. Thus far, the government has promised 300 parcels of land to the campesinos.

Conflicting responses by government authorities highlight the lack of consensus within the governing National Liberation Party over the best way to deal with the country's growing popular protest movement.

Asserting that United Brands provoked the problem in the first place by unilaterally firing thousands of workers, Public Security Minister Edmundo Solano declared that the government's security forces would not use force to evict the squatters. A local court, however, issued an order calling for the expulsion of the campesinos, and on July 20, Minister of Government Alfonso Carro announced that the government's patience was dwindling and that the Rural Guard would soon move in and remove the occupants by force.

Sources in Costa Rica reported in midAugust that several leaders of the occupation have been arrested. The sources also report that the Rural Guard has been picking up groups of campesinos who leave the settlement to obtain provisions and dropping them off in towns 20 to 25 miles away.

A high-level commission appointed to deal with the conflict raised the possibility of buying some of the occupied lands from the banana company. But the idea was immediately rejected by the local United Brands general manager Richard Johnson, who insisted that any such decision would have to come from company headquarters in New York.

The action has had a series of important repercussions for the two-year-old Social Democratic government of Luis Alberto Monge. The opposition Christian Democratic and Popular Vanguard parties introduced an agrarian reform bill in the Costa Rican legislature. The bill calls for a limit on the size of all lands owned by foreign corporations, including the extensive banana holdings of United Brands, Standard Fruit, and Del Monte.

The occupation has also apparently inspired other land-hungry Costa Rican campesinos: in the weeks following the action, the country has witnessed an unprecedented wave of land takeovers. Estimates of landlessness in the rural areas run as high as 70 percent. Said one local peasant, "Either we invade these unused ' lands, or we starve to death."

Kent Norsworthy is a freelance journalist with Agencia Periodistica de Informacion Alternativa in Nicaragua.