• alvvayson@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The United Fruit Company has been defunct for almost a century by now.

    I still recommend buying fair trade Bananas if you can afford it, but eating a banana helps poor people in third world countries more than eating an apple, which doesn’t send a single cent to the third world.

    And second, why does the OP consider eating bananas exploiting banana farmers, but eating apples is not exploiting apple farmers??

    Edit: thanks for the downvotes you dumb fascists.

    I actually grew up in a banana producing country. All the leftists shitting on our produce are enemies of the people. People in poor third world countries desperately need money and selling their produce is how they earn money.

    Yes, buy fair trade, that actually gives a better price to those farmers. But even without fair trade, buying tropical products helps tropical farmers.

    • Catoblepas
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      10 months ago

      Buying bananas to help people in developing countries is like shopping at Walmart to help the employees. The vast majority of that money isn’t going to them.

      • jimbo@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Buying bananas to help people in developing countries is like shopping at Walmart to help the employees. The vast majority of that money isn’t going to them.

        This is true, but at the end of the day, that’s where those people get the money they need to survive. Refusing to buy a banana isn’t going to magic them up another industry.

        • Catoblepas
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          10 months ago

          Sure, but don’t pretend it’s for the benefit of the people working in unsafe conditions for extreme poverty wages to provide the developed world with cheap bananas.

          An individual not buying bananas isn’t going to change the industry, and neither is telling people you have to buy bananas to save the poor banana farm workers.

      • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        That’s really short sighted and screws over people.

        With any product, the vast majority of money goes to rich capitalists.

        But for a banana farmer, all their money comes from selling bananas. Sure, short term they could switch to manioc or rice or tobacco or some other tropical produce, but if no one buys those products, they have no income.

        Longer term, they try to give their kids education so that the next generation will not be banana farmers, but that’s only possible if they have enough money to send kids to school.

        Buying fair trade Bananas is the best thing we can do to help them, aside from charity. Buying normal bananas is the second best thing that can be done.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      Because bananas are grown in third world countries where many mega corps are controlling many aspects of the food growing and trading.

      While apple farmers, you can litterally go pick them yourself by the price set by the farmer.

      This is more nuanced than that, but that’s the gist.

    • calzone_gigante@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Buying from shitty companies that exploit a country won’t help people on that country.

      Those companies do not inject money on the cities they enter. They bribe politicians for advantages, destroy the natural resources, and go as close to slave work as they can while paying no taxes.

    • Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Which tells you how large of an impact they had if their legacy is still with us.

      Are the apple farmers living and working in a third world country? Getting as little as possible?