Today we, once again, journeyed over the continental divide to visit banana and pineapple plantations on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. On our visit today we learned how to grow and export tropical fruits such as bananas and pineapples from Costa Rica.

For pineapple and banana, the supply chain is much different than the supply chain for coffee because coffee takes much longer to go bad. For bananas, they have to be harvested before they are ripe and pineapples do not ripen any more after they are picked so in both cases time is of the essence. The workers also have to work year-round for pineapples and bananas because they can be harvested year-round while coffee can only be harvested 3 months out of the year.

The problem that pineapple and banana farmers have is that their crops are all the same genticlly so if a virus was to kill one it could kill the whole crop. To mitigate this problem farmers are using funguses to help defend the plants.

If I was a plantation worker, I would perfer working on a banana plantation to any other plantation because there is something satisfying about cutting down the bushels and dying trees.