AgroFair marks 25 years of Fairtrade

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Fairtrade fruit specialist AgroFair has witnessed big changes over the past 25 years, but the company’s Frank Vermeersch and Luud Clercx recognise that the job is far from done.

by Tom Joyce

@tomfruitnet

This year marks 25 years of Fairtrade bananas. Would you tell us a little bit about the journey AgroFair and Fairtrade have been on?

Frank Vermeersch: I wasn’t there when it started, but I’m sure that at that moment there was a feeling of “against all odds”. The founding fathers of our company were the same as Max Havelaar. They knew already that with coff ee something was very wrong, and they realised that with bananas it was a litt le bit the same.

It has been quite a journey, with ups and downs, and now we are at this famous 25 years, and we realise that the job hasn’t been completed. There are a lot of other things that need to be tackled now.

Luud Clercx: A lot has happened in that time. We started with a few containers, now we’re doing more than 100 containers a week. And also other importers have started with Fairtrade. The concept of what Fairtrade is has also changed. Nowadays, what’s also important is biodiversity, sustainable soil management, promoting healthy soils, recycling plastic waste, reducing pesticides, carbon footprint, water footprint.

We now have a project to recycle banana plastic in Peru and the Dominican Republic. We have another project in the Dominican Republic helping our producers get group certifi cation for the alliance for water stewardship in the future. Has the Covid-19 crisis highlighted the importance of a robust sustainable supply chain?

LC: Covid was an important lesson, although it didn’t aff ect the banana sector very much – we still delivered to Europe. It’s important to take biosecurity measures, for people’s health and also now for this new disease which appeared in Peru and Colombia, TR4. This is a very serious question for the banana sector because there’s nothing you can do about it except take biosecurity measures at the farm gate and also at the national level.

Because this is a soil-borne disease, there’s a hypothesis that the more biodiversity in the soil, the bett er, as part of the fi rst defence lines against TR4. In the long run, you need a variety that is resistant against this disease. So there are now eff orts going on, breeding to create this resistant variety. But it will take 10-12 years, I think.

What you see with organic bananas is greater biodiversity in the soil, and there’s a lot of competition among the microorganisms. There’s a food web in the soil itself, so other microorganisms att ack this fungus. This hypothesis is being tested.

Finally, where next for Fairtrade?

FV: Nowadays, everybody’s asking for organic Fairtrade, which is a good thing. But there’s still a lot of conventional Fairtrade. There is a danger that those who can only grow conventional Fairtrade will be pushed back into poverty.

There’s also the price issue, which is a race to the bott om. It’s ridiculous, asking for €0.69-€0.99 for 1kg of bananas. You cannot explain this anymore. It’s simply not possible. In fact, it has to stop. _

ABOVE—Greater biodiversity could help fi ght TR4