Flying bananas: small producer tactics and the (un)making of Philippine banana export chains

Abstract

Global production network (GPN) analysts argue that workers actively contribute to the shaping of GPNs through different forms of agency. In this contribution I extend this argument to the tactical agency of small producers. By focusing on the phenomenon of side-selling among Filipino banana contract farmers, I show that these tactics have contributed to the emergence of alternative trade networks that undermined traditional lead firm behaviour and inspired new struggles over chain governance. However, as a diverse and ambiguous group of growers engages in this tactical agency, predominantly as small capital, they also contribute to the continuation of broader dynamics of capital accumulation and labour exploitation.

Keywords:

• global production networks
• tactics
• everyday resistance
• small producers
• production regime
• contract farming

Acknowledgements

I owe my gratitude to my two invaluable field guides and the many respondents who were willing to share their time, stories and insights with me. I thank Rachel Earl for copy-editing and Jeroen Adam, Jun Borras, Maarten Hendriks, Rosanne Rutten, Steven Schoofs, Dorien Vanden Boer, Eric Vanhaute, Bram Verelst and three anonymous peer reviewers for their highly valuable comments on earlier drafts. Responsibility for the analysis and possible errors remains solely mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Besides GCC, the literature also speaks of global value chains (GVC) and global production networks (GPN) (Bair 2005). I will use the terms here interchangeably as the distinction between them is not central to my argument.

2 For privacy concerns, I use pseudonyms for persons and places referred to at the municipal level and below.

3 More broadly, it also refers to any trade in goods that ‘fell off the back of a truck’.

4 With respect to contract farming, however, Walker (2009) and Clapp (1988) show how contract farmers’ mixture of resistance and collaboration shapes and enables relations of contract farming.

5 With the exception of the largest contract grower in the area (over 100 hectares), who continued to manage operations and labour relations himself.

6 The negotiation process of these collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) is a further illustration of the way in which the contract farming scheme blurred the employment relations between itself, growers and workers. On paper, the CBA was a document between workers and their legal employers, i.e. the landowners/growers of a specific collective production zone. While the company thus remained out of the picture from a legal point of view, negotiations on behalf of the growers were conducted by the growers’ association’s secretary. She, at the same time, was the Human Resources officer of Stanfilco for the entire zone.

7 This argument was made by several respondents from different backgrounds, with regard to both historical and current practice, in the Philippines (David et al. 1983, 42) and elsewhere (Soluri 2005, 28).

8 Another tactic is to purposely hit the ground with a banana bunch, so that the sand sticking to it would hint at a cracked banana stem (so-called ‘tip-off’).

9 Banana boxes are transported on pallets. These pallets may be produced by the local timber industry. Several other industries are linked to the banana industry in similar ways. Examples are trucking services or bamboo production, used for fencing and propping up of the banana plants.

10 Initially some of the growers formed cooperatives and sold their produce on a collective basis to Stanfilco. However, most of these initiatives did not last long. The cooperatives that currently exist in the area emanate from groups of agrarian reform beneficiaries (who were encouraged by law to form cooperatives) rather than groups of long-time Stanfilco growers.

11 Under the ex-patio contract, ownership of the produce transfers to the company at the point of entry into the company’s packing plant, where it is classified, packed and eventually paid for according to quality. Producers have little to no transparency or control over the way quality selection is done. In this sense, it differs from the also common freight on board (FOB) contract. Here, the packing plant is usually managed by a trader, grower, or growers’ cooperative, allowing them more control over quality selection and thus the final price. Ownership of the produce then transfers at the end of the packing process.

12 Several respondents mentioned a Saudi trading firm, Abbar and Zaini (ANZ), as the first large-scale investor to engage in spot buying. After ANZ split from their Italian partners of Unifrutti, they launched an aggressive attack on the Philippine market in 2008 by offering prices up to USD 2 above contract prices. The stint failed because of quality concerns (interviews February 2016, March 2017; see also Quitoriano 2008).

13 For a more historical account of the role of top-down coercive violence in the banana sector, see segments of de la Rosa (2005). In interviews, several cases of killings throughout the province over the last 15 years were mentioned. Narratives of such (usually unsolved) killings often link them to banana-related conflict. The direction of violence may be both downward and upward oriented, as well as among peers.

14 Most such cases enter the legal system as criminal ‘theft’ cases rather than civil ‘breach of contract’ cases which take longer in judicial procedure. Cases rarely reach an actual verdict in court but are resolved through ‘amicable settlement’ at the Municipal Trial Court. The settlement usually entails a bail-out of the offender after a night in jail, and restitution for the offender (see Franco 2008 for a critical note on the extensive use of ‘amicable settlement’ in the rural Philippines). However, in those exceptional cases that came to a verdict, the ‘offender’ was usually found not guilty, as at the time of interception (e.g. night-time harvest), the bananas are technically not yet company property (key informant interview, February 2017). A legislative proposal to counter pole-vaulting (i.e. House Bill 4582) is currently under discussion at the Philippine National Congress.

15 As of February 2016, 634 Cavendish banana packing plants were registered as required with the Bureau of Plant Industry – Plant Quarantine Service of the Philippine Department of Agriculture (BPI-PQS). Of the 16 based in barangays Likuran and Pinto (La Frontera), 11 pack for spot market buyers. These official numbers do not include unregistered packing plants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) through a PhD fellowship and travel grant.

Notes on contributors

Robin Thiers

Robin Thiers is an FWO doctoral student at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at UGent (Belgium). His doctoral research focuses on questions of agency within the political economy of the Philippine banana sector. He holds an MSc in globalisation and development studies from SOAS (UK).