Chiquita Brands International

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Chiquita Brands International Sàrl

logo
legal form Limited Liability Company (Switzerland)
founding March 30, 1899
Seat Etoy VD ,SwitzerlandSwitzerland
management Carlos López Flores ( President )
Number of employees 20,000
Branch Fruit , mainly bananas
Website www.chiquita.de
As of January 26, 2018

Carlos López Flores, President of Chiquita
New Chiquita headquarters in Etoy, Switzerland
Chiquita banana plantation in Costa Rica, with the Turrialba volcano in the background.

Chiquita Brands International Sàrl is a fruit trading company and one of the largest banana exporters in the world. Chiquita also markets various other fruits and vegetables and is active in over 70 countries. "Chiquita" is Spanish and means "little girl" (also common as a loving salutation for a woman). Founded in 1899 as United Fruit Company (UFC, also UFCO), the company grew big selling tropical fruits in Europe and the US (mainly bananas ) grown on plantations in countries in the Global South . The history of the company is characterized by the neo-colonial exploitation of the people in the production countries, extensive political influence and the support of totalitarian political regimes and groups to secure their own business.

At the beginning of the millennium, the company appeared in the media in connection with so-called greenwashing , a PR method used to hide the irresponsible way of treating employees and resources.

After the banana deliveries for the German market and various countries in Northern Europe had mostly been processed via the seaport in Bremerhaven in the past few decades , Chiquita reorganized its delivery routes at the beginning of 2018 and has been supplying Germany and Northern Europe since then via the Dutch seaport in Vlissingen . The company has two headquarters, one in Europe in Etoy , Switzerland, and one in America in Fort Lauderdale .

At the beginning of the millennium, the company appeared in the media in connection with so-called greenwashing , a PR method used to hide the irresponsible way of treating employees and resources. The company has already come under fire several times for its employee and environmental policy. In addition, a class action lawsuit has been brought in the United States for supporting Colombian paramilitaries .

history

The Chiquita Scandinavia in banana handling in Bremerhaven

Interventions in Honduras since 1910

Chiquita bananas on a market stall in Bonn, 1988

Similar events also took place in other Central American countries. B. In 1910 a ship with hired mercenaries (most of them ex-convicts) was sent from New Orleans to Honduras to overthrow the president. The reason for the action was that the president had refused to give United Fruit tax breaks. After the coup , Honduras exempted the UFC from paying any taxes for 25 years. From 1912 to 1924 alone there were four US interventions in Honduras .

In 1975 it came out that Eli Black, the head of the then renamed United Brands company, wanted to buy $ 2.5 million in tariff benefits from the President of Honduras. Eli Black then committed suicide .


The company was founded on March 30, 1899 in Boston under the name United Fruit Company (UFC, also UFCO). The company was formed from the merger of the Boston Fruit company , founded by Lorenzo Dow Baker and Andrew W. Preston , and the Tropical Trading and Transport Company founded by Minor C. Keith . Preston had built railroads in Costa Rica and got into the fruit business through it. In 1954 the UFC had a world market share of 33%.

In June 1970, the United Fruit Company merged with AMK Corporation to become the United Brands Company. In August 1984, Carl H. Lindner Jr. took control of the company, which moved to Cincinnati the following year . In 1984 the name was changed to Chiquita Brands International, in 1991 the Frutas Dominicanas group bought up and thus started producing pineapples.

In an effort to expand its wide-ranging businesses, United Fruit became a major developer of radio technology . The company later cooperated with other companies to form the Radio Corporation of America . The group also revolutionized merchant shipping by promoting the development of refrigerated ships . The air-conditioned Hapag ships of the Prinzen class with excellently equipped passenger facilities for 100 1st class passengers were the model of the twelve ships of the "5000 Ton Class" (also for 100 passengers) of the United Fruit Company, which were operated by Workman, Clark & ​​Co from 1908 were built in Belfast . Further ship series with the combination of bananas and passengers emerged and at the end of the 1930s the UFC had the largest private fleet of ships in the world, called the Great White Fleet .

The company has been working closely with the environmental protection organization Rainforest Alliance since 1992 and is actively involved in the certification program. Since the year 2000, all farms owned by Chiquita have met the 200 environmental and social standards of the Rainforest Alliance. In 2005, this also applied to 93% of independent Latin American farms supplying the Chiquita.

Main entrance to the old United Fruit Building (1920) on St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans , Louisiana

On March 10, 2014 it was announced that the company was planning a merger with Irish competitor Fyffes . From this merger, planned through a share swap, the company could have expected tax benefits by relocating its headquarters to Ireland. A shareholders' meeting stopped this ongoing management plan on October 24, 2014 when a majority voted to negotiate with the Brazilian juice manufacturer Cutrale instead . This against the background that Washington wants to take action against such tax inversion and the Fairtrade Foundation in London lamented the price war against the producers. In January 2015, the Cutrale-Safra Group completed the acquisition of Chiquita.

Massacre in Colombia 1928

On December 6, 1928, between 47 and up to 2,000 striking workers were murdered by military troops in Ciénaga ( Colombia ). The workers demonstrated against the poor working conditions. This event is known as the Masacre de las Bananeras (Banana Workers Massacre) in Colombian history.

In the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel García Márquez describes the inhumane influence of the UFC in Colombia .

Pablo Neruda deals with the work of the UFC in his poem La United Fruit Co. , which is part of the Canto General poetry cycle . This poem also finds its way into the partial setting of the Canto General by Mikis Theodorakis .

Coup in Guatemala in 1954

The United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) owns large tracts of land in Central America . The company's economic interests prompted political intervention by the US in Central America on several occasions. The Monroe Doctrine Following played the interests of the UFC for. B. played a role in the US government providing financial and logistical support for the fall of the government in Guatemala in 1954 .

Until 1985, the headquarters of the UFC was in Guatemala. The group operated plantations , the post office , the railroad and the only Caribbean port. This infrastructure was used almost exclusively for economic purposes; the fees were mostly unaffordable for the civilian population. The dictator Jorge Ubico , who ruled until 1944, granted the UFC duty-free imports on building materials and low export duties on bananas. In 1944, however, the dictatorship in Guatemala was overthrown and Juan José Arévalo was elected as the new democratic president, and Jacobo Arbenz was his successor in 1951 . The new government expropriated about 530 km² of land from the UFC in exchange for compensation and distributed it to smallholders. She also called for better working conditions, minimum wages and social benefits. The UFC then protested to the US State Department and, on the pretext that the new government was communist, demanded its overthrow. The then Secretary of State of the USA, John Foster Dulles (who previously worked as a lawyer at UFC), and his brother Allen Dulles , head of the CIA , then led Castillo Armas on June 16, 1954 with a mercenary force of only 400 men around the Guatemalan exile the fall of the Guatemalan government ( Operation PBSUCCESS ). When President Arbenz finally lost control of his country, he resigned on June 27, 1954, leaving Castillo Armas in office. As one of the first acts of authority, he returned the expropriated land to the UFC and abolished all labor protection laws. This was followed by a military dictatorship supported by the CIA that lasted almost 40 years and probably claimed more than 100,000 lives, many of whom number among the so-called "disappeared" . The events surrounding Operation PBSUCCESS and the involvement of the United Fruit Company were processed literarily in Germany at an early stage: In 1959, Wolfgang Schreyer published Das Grüne Ungeheuer in East Berlin (TV adaptation 1962), in 1960 Karl Heinz Poppe in Reinbek published the banana war .

Protection payments to paramilitary groups in Colombia

In the 90s and early 00s, Chiquita, Dole Food Company , Del Monte Foods , Hyundai Motor Company and other international companies reacted to the unstable political situation in Colombia by making payments to paramilitary groups to secure their business needs. Paramilitary groups targeted companies, demanded protection money and did not shrink from kidnappings and murders. As the security situation in rural areas continued to deteriorate, it became more and more difficult to protect your own employees. Chiquita decided to make protection payments to keep their employees safe. Payments were made to the left FARC from 1990 to 1997 and to the right AUC from 1997 to 2004 . The groups were supposed to protect the banana plantations in Uraba and Santa Maria. In 2001, the US Department of Justice passed a new anti-terror law that banned payments from US companies to foreign terrorist organizations. Both FARC and AUC were on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations at the time . In these new circumstances, Chiquita's payments now violated US law and created a moral and legal dilemma. The company could have stopped making payments and complied with the law, but would have put the lives of its employees at risk. Chiquita decided against it and continued to pay for the time being. In 2003 the company surrendered to the US Department of Justice and was the only American company in Colombia to accept payments. The ministry then brought charges against Chiquita and the company agreed to pay a $ 25 million fine to complete the case.

Today's influence

The group's plantations are still mainly located in Costa Rica , Guatemala , Honduras , Panama and partly in Colombia . In all of these countries, bananas are one of the most important export goods, which means that Chiquita can simply put pressure on the respective governments - a withdrawal from one of these countries would lead to an economic fiasco in this country.

Chiquita and IUF / Colsiba

In 2001 the company signed an "International Framework Agreement" (IFA) with the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Associations (IUF) and COLSIBA, the coordination office for Latin American banana unions. The agreement regulates the freedom of association as well as minimum requirements for working and employment conditions in Latin American banana companies. The application of the regulations is monitored by a review committee. In 2013, the IUF, COLSIBA and Chiquita signed an appendix to the agreement on zero tolerance for sexual harassment in Chiquita establishments.

Chiquita and Rainforest Alliance

Since 1992 Chiquita has been working according to the sustainable agriculture approach of the Rainforest Alliance . It includes the social and environmental guidelines of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), annual audits by independent experts and the Rainforest Alliance certification of farms that meet the requirements. In the 1996 annual report, Chiquita announced that it would certify all Latin American farms to Rainforest Alliance standards by 1999 ("to the completion of the certification program in all of its Latin American operations by 1999"). In 2012, the company announced in its CSR report that all of its own plantations and over 200 suppliers were Rainforest Alliance certified. This corresponds to an area of ​​more than 40,000 hectares of land.

SA8000

In 2000, Chiquita took over the SA8000 and integrated the labor law regulation into the revised company code of conduct. According to its own statements, the standard developed by the organization Social Accountability International is based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and on national and UN jurisprudence. Anyone who applies the SA8000 standard is committed to ensuring that employees' rights are respected through policies and procedures. All Chiquita's own plantations have been SA8000 certified since 2004 and are audited annually by external experts.

In 1944, the Chiquita logo with Miss Chiquita was designed by Dik Browne , the illustrator of Hägar the Terrible .

criticism

The authors of the standard work Black Book brand companies accuse the group of "exploitation in banana plantations, child labor, sexual harassment, use of dangerous plant toxins". There are allegations of contaminated drinking water, a lack of occupational safety and sexual abuse. Fatal poisoning occurred in the late 1990s because of the pesticides and the lack of protection.

As before, unionized workers are disadvantaged and the massive use of pesticides in particular is repeatedly criticized. In 1992, the group caught the attention of environmentalists when it bought, cleared and converted several forest areas in Costa Rica into plantations.

From 1992 Chiquita tried a lot of public relations work to get rid of the bad reputation, mainly because of the use of pesticides. However, negotiations with environmental organizations and trade unions are difficult and slow.

Political influence is still there, for example, in 1998, when the US and EU argued over issues relating to the international banana trade (see banana war ), the company transferred $ 1.4 million as party donations to Washington .

Chiquita is sometimes very aggressive against media reports of grievances in the company. This was particularly evident when the newspaper The Cincinnati Enquirer published the extensive report by the investigative journalist Michael Gallagher in May 1998 , in which the group accused, among other things, of exploitative practices on its Latin American plantations, consciously accepting environmental damage and tolerating cocaine smuggling in the transport of goods has been. When it was discovered that Gallagher had illegally obtained some of his information through recordings from the company's voicemail system, Chiquita put the newspaper under massive pressure with legal action. The Cincinnati Enquirer had to pay Chiquita at least $ 10 million in damages and post a front page apology. Gallagher was fired and complained about by Chiquita. Although the company rejected all of the allegations made in Gallagher's report, it has never challenged them legally.

Movies

  • About bananas and republics. 53-minute television documentary by Mathilde Damoisel for Arte (France 2017)

literature

  • Peter Chapman: Bananas: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World. Canongate, Edinburgh (et al.) 2007, ISBN 1-84195-881-6 .
  • Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer: Banana War: CIA Coup in Guatemala. 3rd edition, Rotpunktverl., Zurich 1992, ISBN 3-85869-079-1 .
  • Jason M. Colby: The business of empire. United fruit, race, and US expansion in Central America. Ithaca et al. a. (Cornell University Press) 2011. ISBN 978-0-8014-4915-4 .

Web links

Commons : Chiquita Brands International  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Company history ( Memento from April 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (www.chiquita.de)
  2. ↑ moneyhouse.ch
  3. ↑ Form 10-K 2014
  4. ^ A Postcolonial Perspective on the Banana Massacre. Retrieved August 7, 2020 (English).
  5. ↑ Caroline Anders, Andres Ayala, Brianna Baughman, Nicholas Buehler, Cynthia Cahya: Ubiquitous Banana Dictatorship in Guatemala . In: Perspectives on Black Markets v.2 . ( pressbooks.pub [accessed August 7, 2020]).
  6. ↑ Unpeeling the Controversial History of Bananas. Retrieved August 7, 2020 .
  7. ↑ a b Michael Jessen: Chiquita-Going Green or Greenwashing Corporate Crime? ( Memento of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Organic Consumers Association , February 6, 2001
  8. ↑ a b Rachael Jackson: Green bananas? Chiquita teams up with the Rainforest Alliance , Earth Action Network , Jan. 1, 2007
  9. ↑ Chiquita leaves Bremerhaven Report in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung of February 16, 2018, accessed on February 18, 2018
  10. ↑ Chiquita justifies protection payments: "Wanted to protect life" ( Memento from November 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , Kleine Zeitung , November 16, 2007
  11. ↑ Stephen Schlesinger , Stephen Kinzer : Banana War - CIA Putsch in Guatemala , Ernst Kabel Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-921909-52-X , p. 72 ff.
  12. ↑ Olivier Grivat: The Banana King , who rules from the shores of Lake Geneva. In: swissinfo.ch . April 25, 2019, accessed April 27, 2019 .
  13. ^ What is the Significance of the United Fruit Company? In: WorldAtlas . ( worldatlas.com [accessed August 17, 2018]).
  14. ^ Neil Thomson, Charles Baden-Fuller: Basic Strategy in Context. European text and cases . Wiley, Chichester 2010, pp. 200f.
  15. ↑ Chiquita's Rainforest Alliance certification ( Memento from September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  16. ↑ Chiquita and Fyffes merge to become the largest banana trader. Süddeutsche.de , March 10, 2014, accessed on March 10, 2014 .
  17. ↑ http://orf.at/stories/2251029/2251028/ Fusion of the banana giants burst, Now more discussions, ORF.at October 24, 2014
  18. ^ The Cutrale-Safra Groups Complete Acquisition of Chiquita. Retrieved August 17, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer: Banana War - CIA Putsch in Guatemala , Ernst Kabel Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-921909-52-X . P. 72 ff.
  20. ↑ Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer: Banana War - CIA Putsch in Guatemala , Ernst Kabel Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-921909-52-X , pp. 44-71.
  21. ↑ Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer: Banana War - CIA Putsch in Guatemala , Ernst Kabel Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-921909-52-X , p. 14 ff.
  22. ↑ derstandard.at: Chiquita defends payment of protection money. December 11, 2007, accessed April 7, 2015 .
  23. ↑ 60 Minutes - "The Price of Bananas" , CBS , August 9, 2009
  24. ↑ The Corporate Social Responsibility Story of Chiquita , Université de Lausanne et Fondation Guilé, page 41ff., June 5, 2015
  25. ↑ Peter Schelling: Chiquita admits payments to terrorists , Die Welt , September 19, 2007
  26. ^ Latimes.com: Chiquita to pay fine for deals with militants. March 15, 2007, accessed April 7, 2015 .
  27. ↑ Miss Chiquita | Chiquita. Retrieved August 17, 2018 .
  28. ↑ Common Dreams April 25, 2002: Ecuador: Widespread Labor Abuse on Banana Plantations ( November 14, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved April 17, 2011.
  29. ↑ enquirer.com: An apology to Chiquita. June 28, 1998, accessed April 10, 2015 .