The following review is a selection from Squamish CAN's documentary library available to everyone and located at In The Raw Organics/Gelato Carina.
Bananas! is a film that comes out and tells us, pretty convincingly, just how screwed up this planet is. This time the target is Dole Foods.
This is a controversial documentary from Sweden that Dole has spent significant effort trying to make sure never gets seen.
This is quite understandable as the most exciting parts of the film are actual courtroom footage of the two sides battling it out.
Giant multinational corporations have a nasty reputation for doing some horrible things to poor foreign workers in the name of making money.
This reputation is there for good reason, and although it's changing slowly, we're still alive and well in a capitalist system that rewards such behaviour.
This particular story comes at us as an Erin Brockovich-style courtroom drama featuring Juan Dominguez, a colourful Latin American lawyer working on behalf of 12 Nicaraguan banana plantation workers.
His target is Dole Foods in a groundbreaking legal battle for their use of a banned pesticide that was known by the company to cause sterility.
On one side are the illiterate, dirt poor, sterile banana farmers and on the other side is Dole Foods, whose own president and CEO admits to spraying pesticides on the workers after being told by Dow Chemicals that the stuff is proven harmful.
You know it's scary dangerous when Dow Chemical refuses to sell it.
It remains a landmark case for workers' rights but in the end very few of the workers actually received justice. The film ends with a quote that I won't give away, but is quite depressing.
Even more depressing is to think this is all over just one fruit - what about the thousands of other products that are conveniently shipped to our doorstep?
It's a pretty good film with great arguments to shop smart and local whenever you can.
