«We are always affected by poison when we work. I even wrote a warning to the company but it didn’t help. We have no other choice.”
Gérman Jimenez, 51, works as a herbicide from 4.30am to 11.30am. He is one of the luckiest because he works only seven hours, earns 18 thousand colones, around 32 euros a day, has four children, and lives inside the plantation in a wooden and sheet metal shack, without drinking water or electricity.
Meanwhile, another team is busy covering banana bunches with blue plastic bags impregnated with chlorpyrifos and other insecticides, to prevent the fruits from being eaten by parasites, insects and birds. The workers, mostly Nicaraguans, move quickly, from plant to plant, with a wooden ladder on their shoulders. They place it on the trunk, quickly climb up, cover their helmet and continue.
Next to them, other workers can be seen attached to a pulley, via a belt tightened around their abdomen. Their task is to run, pulling, like oxen, the bunches of still unripe bananas to the packing machine, the area for processing, packaging and treating the bananas destined for export.
Here the bananas are first washed with citric acid or a disinfectant to kill the cochineal, then cut with a repetitive motion, selected according to size, placed in a fumigation chamber to slow down the ripening of the crown and packaged to be sent in Europe.
Following this process are mainly working women. Typically, the day begins at 5 in the morning and ends at 5 in the afternoon, interrupted by a thirty-minute break. The pay varies between 22 and 30 dollars a day.
