Step 1: Growing

The Grower is responsible for three major things. Growing the fruit, picking and harvesting the fruit, and finally keeping a record of all of the Banana’s. The Grower must document when the fruit was harvested, the description of the banana, as well as the field identification. All of this information is extremely important to the future processes of the banana. To ensure freshness and to make sure the fruit can be traced back to the correct grower through all of the future processes, this information must be accurate and completed by the grower(Banana Supply Chain Traceability). In our case, the grower of these banana’s take place primarily in Central America: like Honduras, Coast Rica, Panama, and Guatemala (M, Brent).  They must be picked while they are green so there is enough time to transport the bananas to the consumer later. The workers are paid in piece rates to make sure working moves quickly and efficiently. Piece rate is different than hourly wage because they are paid for each bushel, or ‘piece’ of banana. The rates are very low which is why the men working work upwards of 12 hours at a time. Most of the growing is happening in under developed countries so many of the people being employed are living in poverty. They must work through sickness and injuries. A lot of times, this leads to the men getting even sicker or even more injured and hurting their family even more so than if they had just rested up. Unfortunately, resting is not something anyone can afford to do. Over time, the piece rates have decline even more per banana causing excessive health problems in those areas (Hamer, Ed).

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