Jonathan Rosenthal, fair-trade fruit purveyor, answers questions 0

Jonathan Rosenthal.

What work do you do?

I am the top banana at Oké USA, a new fair-trade fruit company owned by farmers, fair-trade organizations, and nonprofits.

What does your organization do?

Oké USA is a new model of fair trade that links farmers, fair-trade organizations, and eaters. Farmers get a fair price, a fair share, and a fair say; eaters get a delicious banana at a fair price.

We guarantee farmers a living wage, even when international prices are inhumanely low. Farmers own half of our main parent company, AgroFair, and get a share of profits. Oké bananas are all organic or grown with ecological standards that minimize pesticide use.

We are well supported by AgroFair, a $60 million per year European fair-trade fruit company; Red Tomato, an innovative nonprofit marketing organization helping family farmers in the U.S. survive; and Equal Exchange, the U.S.'s pioneering fair-trade coffee (and now tea and chocolate) company.

What are you working on at the moment?

Orange you glad they don't exploit banana workers?

Photo: Agrofair/K. Viemose

We just began importing organic fair-trade bananas from Ecuador in August. El Guabo, a cooperative of over 300 family farmers, produces the bananas. We are already shipping a container every week -- about 100,000 bananas! We will soon be importing ecological (integrated pest management) fair-trade bananas from Coopetrabasur, a worker-cooperative plantation in Costa Rica managed by over 70 banana farmers.

In the coming years, we will expand to import mangoes, pineapples, coconuts, and other tropical fruits.

How do you get to work?

I mostly work out of my house. We also have space inside the offices of Red Tomato in Canton, Mass., about 23 miles away. I travel there one or two days per week in my 1996 Saturn SW2. I also travel regularly by car to the Chelsea produce market where our bananas are ripened and stored.

What long and winding road led you to your current position?

In 1980, in Boston, I got a job in a food cooperative warehouse as a warehouse worker. I began working with two colleagues, Michael Rozyne and Rink Dickinson, to steer the co-op movement back in a direction where we could support social change, especially in Third World countries. Eventually, we started a worker cooperative and began selling a small line of coffees, mostly from Nicaragua. We experimented with Cape Verdean tuna fish, Mexican honey, Sri Lankan tea from a Buddhist development movement, and Filipino banana chips. Eventually, we realized coffee worked much better than these other food products. We ended up developing a line of coffees from about a dozen countries.

Our small experiment -- could we hold on to our values and run a successful business, something unheard of in the 1980s? -- is now a more-than-$20-million company and is still a worker cooperative sticking to its ideals. Now, though, there are more than 400 other companies doing the same thing through a program called fair-trade certified.

What people said couldn't be done is now considered good business practice! While we didn't create all of the change ourselves, we are proud of playing a role in showing that not only can business be accountable to social and ecological ideals, it must be if life on planet earth is to survive.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

I was born in New York City and lived in several suburban locations during my childhood. I moved to Waterville, Maine, for college and dropped out after two years to focus on political organizing. I moved to Boston for a summer in 1980. And 26 years later, I am still here.

Who is your environmental hero?

One of the people I most respect on the planet is Vandana Shiva. She is a courageous, articulate, and tireless leader for cultural, environmental, and social justice. Her ability to weave together many different perspectives and philosophies is inspiring and humbling.

What's your environmental vice?

My first vice is that I am living a fairly typical middle-class life. For example, my immediate family owns and drives two cars.

How do you spend your free time? Read any good books lately?

I spend my free time having fun with my family (my wife, Ora Grodsky, and my two daughters, Sasha and Zoe), doing yoga, and reading. In addition to newspapers, too many magazines, and blogs, I read one or two novels a week.

What's your favorite meal?

Southern Indian cooking, especially masala dosa, is wonderful. I think good company is an important ingredient for a great meal.

What's your favorite place or ecosystem?

The Findhorn Foundation in Findhorn, Scotland. It is an intentional spiritual community I have visited several times. I have found deep spiritual challenges there and deep spiritual connection.

If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?

Require all national politicians to take a dose of Sodium Pentothal before all public appearances, to enhance their truthfulness. One immediate result would be the dramatic engagement of the government in reversing our death march into the impending global climate holocaust.

Who was your favorite musical artist when you were 18? How about now?

My favorite music when I was 18 was Bob Dylan's. Now, I have many musical loves and interests, including Silvio Rodríguez. Interestingly, he has been called the Bob Dylan of Cuba. I especially love his live album with Eduardo Aute, Mano a Mano. Lately, I have been listening to a song called "19 Miles to Baghdad" by Lizzie West.

What's your favorite movie?

The movie that comes to mind was made by a couple of friends. It's called A Panther in Africa. It is a fascinating look at America, race, fame, and the passage of time.

Which actor would play you in the story of your life?

I don't have a clear vision of one person, but a good friend has told me about the big heart of Noah Wyle. He could do a good job, I think, of playing me.

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?

Spend one day where you ask yourself about each person you encounter -- in person, on the telephone, email, IM, etc. -- how can I be of service to this person today?

Oké-Dokey

Don't you think it is strange that people will cheer your environmental efforts when you transport fruit a thousand miles?    -- Brandon Fedor, Plano, Texas

Jonathan Rosenthal, top banana at fair-trade fruit company Oké USA.

Yes, I do. One of the interesting things about fair trade is that for many it becomes the solution. For me, fair trade is an opening -- a window into reassessing choices we make about how we live in community with the rest of the planet. If we globalized a living wage across the planet, banana consumption -- like coffee and many other things -- would collapse. We aren't very close, in my view, to that kind of humane global system.

So then I ask how we should proceed, given the fact that 25 million people depend on the coffee industry, with all of its contradictions, and 10 million people depend on the banana trade. Are we perpetuating a very wasteful system? Yes. Given it is a deeply entrenched system, should we just refuse to participate or attempt to reform, maybe even radically reform, the system? I think my ideal is that people are working on both approaches. I am glad people are looking at ways to eliminate wasteful global trade. And I am thankful I am part of a growing movement to reform an industry with a 100-plus-year history of terror.

Where can we find Oké bananas? How can we put pressure on our local grocers to provide fair-trade, organic fruits?    -- Grist editors

Oké has only been getting bananas in stores since mid-August. You can find Oké in most food cooperatives in the Northeast and on a few select college campuses. We are working hard to make our fruit more accessible. Check out our website for ways to get involved and help us expand. As always, we urge you to buy other fair-trade and locally produced products whenever possible.

I am an avid supporter of co-ops, local farms, and fair trade. Why is it that fair trade generally applies to luxury -- or at least non-essential -- food items?     -- Elizabeth Ferry, Hanover, N.H.

Fair trade has been focused on luxury items because it is easiest to work with products where the exploitation is stark and real difference can be made. Coffee was an obvious choice because we were in the right place at the right time. In business terms, it was the early part of a growth cycle for a new product -- specialty coffee. This meant there was rapid growth, high profit margins, and unusually low barriers to entry -- meaning that in the 1980s, people were buying French roast or breakfast blend and not brands. So there was low loyalty among customers and stores to specific brands. Some companies offered great quality and great service. That was hard to beat, even with fair trade. Coffee worked for us because it was expensive per pound and wasn't grown in the continental U.S. This meant we could ship coffee via UPS almost anywhere, at an affordable cost. When we tried to do the same with honey, we found the cost prohibitive. Selling Mexican honey that was shipped to be packed in New York, then shipped to Boston, and reshipped to a store in California didn't make a lot of sense when honey is produced in California. It wasn't economically, environmentally, or commercially sound or sensible.

One of the exciting things about bananas is that it is a healthy food product that is consumed by over 95 percent of U.S. eaters, including children. Fair trade or not, bananas are an inexpensive food. Of course, there is no such thing as a cheap banana. We pay so little for bananas because farmers and workers who bear the true costs of production with their physical and environmental health are subsidizing them. Fair trade is changing that equation and raising awareness about bananas to push for even more change.

Fair trade is being brought into local food issues and products. Often these don't have standardized quality and price patterns the way many of the Third World goods like coffee and bananas do. This makes it much harder to certify with the same approach.

Another important reason fair trade started with imported goods is a sophisticated form of racism. It is much easier, oddly, to create relationships with people on the other side of the planet and feel like I am fighting the good fight and doing the right thing than it is to focus on doing the same work with oppressed people in my own country, state, community, or backyard. The problems can then be blamed on previous generations and current macro systems. But I don't have to look at my own power and privilege, and I don't have to really change the way my community works.

So I see domestic fair trade as a way to connect the global fair-trade issues with our own more local and palpable social-justice issues. The enemy is still out there at times, but more and more, I realize the struggle begins and ends with my own awareness, learning, and unlearning.

How fair is fair trade?    -- Robert Nicholas, Werstland, Bangladesh

I have often said that fair trade should realistically be called slightly-less-unfair trade. Is my lifestyle comparable to the farmers I trade with? Definitely not. We have a long way to go!

As I wrote earlier, fair trade is a window into a different way of looking at economics, consumption, life, and partnership. It helps us realize how interconnected we all are. We don't have the answer. I am committed, instead, to risk asking very hard questions and to continually craft new answers that incorporate what we learn and unlearn. An early hero of ours at Equal Exchange was a leader in the 1980s in the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka. He used to say, "We build the road as the road builds us." That has become a guiding thought for me.

I want to be clear, though, that I do think fair trade makes a real difference for many people, families, and communities around the globe. That is why I continue to work, learn, create, and innovate within the fair-trade movement. By itself, fair trade isn't going to steer us away from global climate crisis. As part of movements to raise and change awareness, it is a powerful tool because it harnesses the tools of the business community. The challenge is to bring back into the definition of a product many of the social, environmental, and spiritual costs that have been externalized in our capitalist economy. The challenge gets more complex when we also acknowledge the danger of using business tools. It is very easy to become comfortable working at the speed of business, which means using this same harmful process of externalizing with democratic and open processes, emotions, and relationships because they slow us down. Our whole society is designed to prod us to go faster and faster while our inner lives need us to go slower and slower. Can we go fast and go slow at the same time?

To go deeper, I think U.S. culture is built on a foundation of business as a way of life and a journey to ever better things and a better life. This culture is also built on a foundation of extermination of Native peoples, appropriation of land, and slavery. We have never healed or fully reconciled with that brutal history. We still see people and the planet as "other" -- as something we can exploit and use for our own well-being. So on any scale beyond very small and local, I don't think there could be something truly fair.

What do you view as the pros and cons of farmer ownership in a U.S.-based organization like Oké? Why do you think we don't see more of this today?    -- Thaleon Tremain, Davis, Calif.

One of the simple reasons there is not more farmer ownership (and I'll assume we are talking small and medium farms) is capital. Most small farmers, especially in Third World countries, don't have access to the capital needed to launch marketing organizations in the U.S. Also, it takes a group of people with the necessary skills. It is extremely difficult to oversee a U.S. company from afar, especially if you don't have advanced business experience, which most small farmers don't have.

However, I think there are new farmer-owned organizations entering the market all the time. One of the most exciting success stories in recent years in the increasingly corporate-controlled organic industry is Organic Valley, a democratic cooperative of over 800 farmers. In the future, I think we will see more interesting ownership models in the marketplace. I have talked to several groups about setting up holding companies owned by farmer cooperatives that would buy controlling shares of publicly traded companies. The key is being able to raise the money. Imagine if farmers could raise the cash to buy 51 percent of Starbucks. More realistically, I think smaller public companies could be professionally bought and operated with farmer ownership. It is a long-term journey to build this capacity on all levels. Our corporate model in the U.S. has lost what community accountability it once had. Return to the holders of capital has taken over. We need to continue to find new ways to return control of trade to communities, not shareholders.

When you expand Oké to import mangoes, pineapples, coconuts, and other tropical fruits, will you be using organic methods to farm those as well?    -- Grist editors

We strongly support good farming practices. It took me over 20 years to really understand what my longtime collaborator Michael Rozyne has told me for decades: "I would rather work with a great farmer who uses ecological practices than a lousy organic farmer." While I still struggle with that, I do believe that, to capture a current phrase, "local is the new organic." Both are very important. Most importantly, we need to do a better job of supporting farms and farmers in our communities and beyond. So we fully support organic practices and more fully support really good farming. Sometimes the choices are difficult. For example, it is very difficult to grow organic bananas in Costa Rica that meet the crazy U.S. cosmetic standards (we demand unblemished fruit). My colleague, Jordan Bar Am, dreams of building a campaign to promote scarred and ugly bananas as being much more sustainable than the Barbie-doll-perfect bananas we take for granted. Organic bananas are often grown in a monocrop fashion in fragile arid areas with lots of irrigation. Is this "better" than ecologically grown bananas grown in a more polycrop fashion? These are difficult issues, and ones we hope Michael Pollan and other writers and activists will begin to tackle.

I have a farm in Honduras where I have mangoes and pineapples that I'm growing organically. I'll be targeting mainly the Hispanic market. Do you have any input?    -- Jose Castellar, Federal Way, Wash.

I am not sure I have much to add. You know that it is very difficult to break into the U.S. market with a new product. Fresh fruit is probably a bit easier than branded products in terms of getting into markets, but logistics and quality control are vital to functioning smoothly. If you don't have great transportation and distribution, I would suggest partnering with an importer/distributor. If you contact me at Oké, I will be happy to give you a couple of leads.

I'm thinking about starting a small natural-foods manufacturing business in an affordable area. I plan on growing the business organically, wearing all the hats myself in the beginning, and having very low fixed costs. Do you have any thoughts about the advantages/disadvantages of businesses like this? How about reading recommendations?     -- Marco Negro, upstate New York

I believe there is great value in the small-is-beautiful approach. Passion is a key tool. I sense you are following your heart and passion. I don't think you can lose, no matter what happens.

For reading, I recommend Rumi and The Bhagavad Gita and other spiritual and reflective text. Explore fiction from other countries to expand your awareness. I think poetry and spiritual texts were the most important business books for me. And always be assessing your skills and finding ways to strengthen your undeveloped areas through new learning.

In addition, I recommend learning how to ask for help. Finding mentors, advisers, and partners is a key to success, no matter what the scale of the business. You do need people with experience and expertise. You might also see if there is a local chapter of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) in your area for more of a small-business community.

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