My first glimpse of the Volta River region is one of breathtaking beauty; the immense river winding through dense green hills. I am travelling to Ghana with our partner BananaLink, to support their campaign, Make Fruit Fair. Our car pulls up nearby to one of the local markets, thronged with elegant women in colourful batik textiles, balancing impossibly laden baskets on their heads.
The idyllic landscape, however, belies the struggles faced by many people living there. The women, many of whom on closer inspection are actually young teenagers, rush to crowd the car, desperate to sell their packets of dried fish. There are so many sellers, each fighting for customers, that it must be surely impossible for any of them to make enough to survive, yet in a region where unemployment levels are alarmingly high and industry is scarce, there are few other options.
We continue to drive to Volta River Estates Limited (VREL), one of the first ever banana plantations to secure Fairtrade certification in 1996, passing many more sellers on the way. In this context, the local impact of a long-standing company such as VREL, which employs approximately 600 people, cannot be underestimated. It explains why all of the workers who I speak to have been working at VREL for 10, 15 and in some cases even 20 years.
The agricultural industry in Ghana is not an easy sector to work in. The minimum wage totals £1.43 per day (the pay rate at VREL exceeds minimum wage) and workers typically spend hours toiling under the hot, humid canopy of banana leaves. The difference that Fairtrade makes to the workers’ lives here is clear.
We attended worker training sessions that were funded by Fairtrade and run by the General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU), in collaboration with BananaLink. Janet, a union representative, proudly stated that “Unions help the weakest to get better salaries”. The workers enthusiastically told us that as a result of the training they had received and the ability to engage with the trade unions, this year they’ve negotiated new worker benefits such as 5 days of paternity leave a year, and a more frequent renewal of protective equipment.
In order to create a truly sustainable industry, worker empowerment is fundamental. Anthony Blay, general manager at VREL, says: “Even when the workers have the best benefits, unionisation gives them a voice. It is important that they are heard.”
Empowered workers do not come from a vacuum, however. The right conditions have to proactively be put in place so that workers have the capacity to negotiate with management or work with unions. Until individual wages, as well as government spending, reach a level where banana workers can afford to access basic services for themselves and their families, it is imperative that all sustainable certification models include a payment which allows the workers to invest in their livelihoods.
Fairtrade is currently the only certification scheme which pays banana workers and farmers an additional sum of money of which they have complete autonomy in how to invest. At VREL this Fairtrade Premium has been spent on a wide range of projects over the years; buying building materials so that workers and their families can live in safer, secure conditions, paying for training for young people so they can learn skills such as IT and carpentry, or providing business start-up loans to workers, thereby providing them with an important source of additional income.
I speak to Prosper Tamakloe, a supervisor who has now been working at VREL for over 20 years. I ask what he thinks of Fairtrade and he tells me that without the Premium he would never have been able to afford to send his two children to secondary school.
Prosper is not the only person to have faced difficulties in educating his children. We visit the nearby South Senchi school where groups of smiling teenagers chatter excitedly before going into their next class. Yet, the headmaster tells us that until a few years ago, there was no school building and the children had their classes under the trees. When it rained, classes would be disbanded. The workers at VREL chose to spend some of their Fairtrade premium on a new school building for the children of the local community - a simple project but one that has had a transformative effect. The children who attend this school are now passing their exams with flying colours.
It is inspiring to see that for every Fairtrade banana I buy, I truly am supporting workers and their communities to build better lives. However, it is also a sobering wake-up call to see how many people across the world still do not have access to basic rights and services. Without a trade system which fairly rewards them for the work they do, banana workers in Ghana have a very slim chance of breaking the poverty cycle.
Content on this page is paid for and provided by Fairtrade Foundation, sponsor of the spotlight on commodities series
