IN THE BANANA TREES; PARENTS ON STRIKE
Photographs and text by David Bacon
The Progressive, 7/16/19
https://progressive.org/dispatches/the-social-movement-photography-of-david-bacon-phillipines-190716/
Editor’s note: We’re delighted to share the fifth of a multi-part series from the archives
of photographer David Bacon. A former union organizer, Bacon’s thirty years of
photographs and writing capture the courage of people struggling for social and
economic justice in countries around the world. His images are now part of Special
Collections in Stanford University’s Green Library.
Part Five tells of his visit to the banana plantations of Mindanao, in the Philippines,
where he found children working in the trees, and a strike by members of banana
cooperatives against the Dole Corporation, to end the poverty that sends children to
work in the fields.
In 1997 I went to the Philippines to document child labor on the banana plantations
producing for the Dole Corporation. In the Campostela Valley on Mindanao I found
many children doing this work. Later, in Carmen, outside of Davao I took photographs
and interviewed workers defending their cooperative, formed as a result of the land
reform after the end of the Marcos dictatorship. They told me they were on strike
against the low prices paid by the Dole Corporation, which forced many families to take
their children to work with them.
At the Soyapa Farms plantation, a huge operation set up in 1992 by Stanfilco, a division
of the Dole Corporation, it wasn't hard to find the children - they were everywhere. In
one corner I found five children from 11 to 17 years old chattering as they flattened out
and recycled sheets of plastic, coated with chemicals, that are inserted between banana
bunches as they grow.
From the shed I walked into the banana groves. The roof of broad leaves overhead
created a hot green shade underneath, and the earth was slick with the dead and rotting
material cut from the trunks of the trees. Here I found the youngest children, including
Alan Algoso, nine, wielding a large sharp sickle he used to cut away the dead layers.
Other children I found in the groves had stopped going to school, however. Benedicto
Hijara, at 15, had been working for three years.
After I returned from San Jose Campostela I went to see Koronado Apuzen, a lawyer
who was helping agricultural workers set up cooperatives. Apuzen had worked with
the National Federation of Labor, and many of the coops had grown out of the unions
in that federation who'd formerly negotiated with Dole.
Workers in four big coops had been on strike against Dole for weeks. Before forming
coops they'd worked for Dole as employees for decades. Using the Philippines' land
reform law passed after the fall of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, they'd gained ownership
of the land.
But Dole controlled the export market, without which the coops couldn't survive, and
force a low price on the new coops. Under Dole's new price to the coops, daily income
dropped from 146 to 92 pesos, and workers lost all the medical and other benefits they
had as direct employees. Faced with virtual starvation, the banana workers refused to
keep on picking bananas.
Instead of finding workers inside the plantations themselves - after all, they now owned
them - I found them in Occupy-style encampments under the trees just outside. Dole
had hired guards and expelled the workers from their own land, shooting one striker.
One of the hardest things to hear was the frustrated dream of the freedom they
expected to gain from land ownership. According to Jesus Relabo, a rank-and-file
leader, "Owning the land is forever. It's something you can give to your children."
Instead, workers had been forced to pull their children out of school. In some cases
they'd gone to live with other relatives. And in other families they'd gone to work, as
had the children in San Jose Campostela.
With the photographs and interviews, I first stopped in Honolulu and talked with Guy
Fujimura, secretary-treasurer of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union
Local 142, which still, at that time, had thousands of members working on Hawaii
plantations. For many years the big sugar and pineapple companies shifted work from
Hawaii to the Philippines and Central America. A lost strike in Mindanao would mean
that agricultural labor there would become even cheaper. Guy ran the photographs and
stories in the union newspaper so that his members, many of whom are Filipino, would
understand the connection.
Back to California the San Francisco Chronicle put the story and photos on its front
page on Christmas day that year. The Institute for Food and Development Policy and
its arm for political campaigns, Food First, turned the photographs and interviews into
a background paper. The next year activists carried it to Seattle to use in the debates
that led to the confrontation in Seattle in which protestors shut down the global meeting
of the World Trade Organization.
pesos a day, and Dini, being older, earned 71. At the time one dollar was worth 40
pesos.
day he climbed a bamboo ladder, pulling a plastic bag over each bunch of bananas. The
bags are treated with a pesticide, Lorsban. Carillon wore a simple dust mask over his
face when he unrolled each bag, but dust masks can't filter out chemicals. Benedicto
Hijara carried a stone and string, which he threw over an overhead cable. He then
climbed a ladder, and tied the string to a tree trunk, propping it upright so it wouldn't
fall over under the weight of the banana bunch. To earn 71 pesos daily, he had to tie up
105 trees.
Benjamin Libron, 15, gathers discarded bananas and then throws them onto a truck for
transport to local markets or Manila. Discarded bananas are the ones Filipinos eat. The
good ones are exported. Near him children flatten out and recycle the sheets of plastic
for 2 centavos for each sheet, earning as much as 50 pesos a day.
wash and sort them in bunches. A child sits on a cableway. In a sari-sari store on the
plantation a family sells basic groceries to the workers.
Felix Bacalso, had to pull all but two of his 10 children out of public school, since he can
no longer afford the small tuition, and the cost of uniforms, food and transportation.
"I'm worried I'll have to send them to work if the price [per box of bananas] doesn't go
up," he said. He spent 8 years as a harvester at Diamond Farms, living with his family
in a 2-room home on the plantation. "If we had a higher price, I could expand my
house. As it is, some of my kids have gone to live with relatives."
Workers set up an encampment outside the gate of the Diamond Farms plantation.
Inside the gate were Dole Corporation guards keeping them out, with a sign declaring
the plantation, which the workers owned, "Private Property."
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