History: Boring, Bunk, and Bananas...?

"It's all about dead people, and nothing to do with us, and real life now, anyway!"

FOR EXAMPLE... Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury. and A Bunch of Bananas. What do you mean, you don't see the connection?! This is quite a lot to read, but please do take the time to go right through it. You're in it too.

Victorian Britain Sees Shaftesbury's Struggle against Greedy Bosses!

Victorian industry workers had a hard time. Example: to stop machines in a factory, in order to clean them, means stopping them making things at the same time. This means you don't make money for a while.
SO	You send 5-year old children under the machines, to clean them while they're still going.
OK	Some of them will get bits like hands chopped off by the machines, some will be killed, but plenty of hungry people means plenty of starving parents who will send more children to the same work.
There were, after all, laws against begging in the streets.
Adults and children would often work 12 to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week. If union leaders organised them to protest, they were simply all sacked, and possibly put in prison. Or shot.
	Meanwhile Factory Bosses, who paid starvation wages, grew rich on the profits. IF times were hard, they paid less... to the workers, not themselves.
	Young Queen Victoria... (I do apologise, this is a picture of an older Queen Victoria, but it'll remind you who we're talking about) ( The one on the LEFT!!) ... as I was saying, the young Victoria was puzzled by the Earl of Shaftesbury, as were many other people. Shafestbury and people like him wanted to change the terrible working conditions. Victoria, like most well-off people, thought that this was simply the way poor people lived, so they were used to it, and that was alright. In fact, God had laid down that there were different classes. Anyway, being poor, they were tough and did not feel pain like other people. By the way, have you forgotten about the bananas?
If you want to find more about the argument, look at The Spartacus Website for yourself! On a page called "Child Labour simulation" there's a list of some people who were for and against the changes.
The thing was not to SEE the poor people if possible. Later, when Queen Victoria visited the industrial midlands of England, she saw more of how they lived, and was shocked, and changed her mind about Shaftesbury. SO - hypocritical, rotten Victorian England was quite happy for starving people to risk their lives and their children to make things for richer people to buy at good prices; they preferred not to know much about them. People like the Earl of Shaftesbury made many people angry by stirring things up. What a good thing there were people like him, who cared enough to change things.
Yeah, yeah, that's all long ago. They're all dead. We don't live like that now. OK, it was bad for them, good for the Earl. Whatever, it's all sorted now. Why should we need to know all that stuff? It doesn't happen now. And why the bananas?? Read on. Here's some modern history. It's happening now - you're part of it. Do you have the power to be Shaftesbury or the factory Boss?
Nowadays, most people in Britain, Europe and the USA buy bananas. They're cheap. They're a good snack. They are among Supermarkets' biggest money earners. Good news for Banana farmers, then.
	To improve profits, most supermarkets only want to buy regular sized, perfect yellow bananas. They don't like waste. So they encourage farmers to use pesticide sprays. To keep them on their toes, if two bunches out of a 15Kg lot are a tiny bit imperfect, most supermarket buyers simply reject the whole lot... ... and don't pay the farmers for growing any of them Then the supermarkets compete to keep the prices low for us, the buyers. They cut the price of the bananas. To protect their profits, they simply pay the farmers less.
So this sounds a bit like the Victorian factory bosses, but where's the danger to lives, and all that?
In South America - Costa Rica, for example, and Cameroon in Africa, big plantations are being cut into the forest. This means the area is more likely to get damaged by floods. They grow bananas more cheaply than ever. HOW? Pest-killing sprays are used a lot to keep the fruit pest free. Aircraft are used to spray the plantations. It would take time to get the workers out of the way first, so they simply have to stay and get sprayed too. Where the sprays run into the river, the crocodiles are dying. People are getting ill, and some babies are being born without hands or feet. The wages of the workers are usually less than the legal minimum wage Where union workers try to change things, they get imprisoned. One has been inside 22 times so far. Many supermarkets in Britain, Europe and the USA like these bananas best because they are so cheap. They arrive ripening in plastic bags, which are treated inside with pesticide, and filled with gas to help the fruit ripen. The pesticide is likely still to be on when you eat the banana. It's known to be poisonous to humans.		In Domenica and the other Windward Islands, Creatures in the rivers were dying. People were getting less healthy. Their profits were getting less and less. A new way of selling called FairTrade began to make a difference to them. They stopped using the chemicals, began charging more for the bananas, and used the extra money to build schools, and so on. The only trouble is, since the bananas cost more, people here in the West have to decide to spend more on the fruit on purpose to help the growers. Their fruit is not ripened in gas filled bags. There is no pesticide used. How can you tell which ones they sell? They have the Fair Trade mark on the bag. They cost more to buy here, but they don't cost the growers their lives.
Now a trade organisation in Europe, led by some big companies, is arguing that the Windward Islands ought not to have a protected share of the market. At present Britain agrees to buy a certain amount of bananas from them. The main reason is that it was Britain who suggested to them that they ought to grow bananas in the first place. Now these big companies are arguing that it's unfair that Britain agrees to buy the Windward Isles bananas. The companies, who are the same ones running the plantations in Cameroon and South America, argue that this stops them from getting a fair crack at the profits. If they succeed, the people on the Windward Isles will have no way of making money, and all the bananas you buy will be produced using methods which Victorian factory owners would be proud of. So back in Victorian times, there was Shaftesbury and his supporters, And there was the great British Victorian Public, buying things produced by unscrupulous factory owners because they were cheap, and they preferred not to ask too many questions. So who are you? The modern equivalent of the Victorian British Public, or the Earl of Shaftesbury & his supporters? - Because what you buy really does affect what the supermarkets sell.

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