Food trading news source freshplaza.com reports a growing quarrel between Latin American banana producers and European food certifiers who, while demanding more and more product certification, cannot guarantee payment for effort. Environmental labels demanded from producers have a cost that end users, such as supermarkets, are often not willing to pay.

Quoting a discussion first reported on semana.com, Freshfruit reported how Jose Antonio Hidalgo, executive director of the Association of Banana Exporters of Ecuador (Aebe), has expressed concern about the low prices being paid for bananas and about the certifications required by the European market.

“Supermarkets say they have optional requirements; but if your product does not comply with those requirements, they don’t buy it. That means they’re not optional requirements. They demand different things but they don’t pay more for doing them.”

Hidalgo said that one of the drawbacks is that the ‘From farm to table’ strategy is that it makes production more expensive, and supermarkets don’t want to pay for that cost of sustainability.

He stated that, while certifiers generate pressure and say producers are compensated, “The truth is they’re not.”

Said Hidalgo to semana.com: “It is a big economic sustainability issue. The region is very committed to sustainability with all that it requires, but the EU cannot be inconsistent. They can’t request something that costs us more while their supermarkets want to pay less.”

He said regional producers have joined a regional network to technically question the certifiers. Technical work has been carried out in Colombia, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and Panama to show the certifier “that some of the ways they were updating to the standard were generating more costs and were not necessary to achieve sustainability”.

Hidalgo suggested, “Together we can build a standard that is sustainable, but also cost-efficient. Our region accounts for 65 per cent of global production, so we managed to change 108 points of that update of the Rainforest standard of 2020.”

Producers have also been working with Latin American governments, providing Fairtrade with an analysis of the cost structure of each country.

Hidalgo concluded, “We have to continue to position the message that the effort to produce a quality banana at the Latin American level has to be recognised, and that certifiers cannot take on a role of imposing supranational standards to fight among themselves to see which is the greenest.”