After a great day to relax and go to the beach, this morning our class made its way to the Sarapiqui, the lowlands of Costa Rica where they grow one of their main exports, pineapples! If you didn’t already know, fresh pineapple is absolutely delicious here in Costa Rica, the taste is so much sweeter than what you would get at your local grocery store back in the States. Today, we got to find out how they have become the main exporter of pineapples in the world. As opposed to coffee where they make up a very small percentage of worldwide exports, pineapples are grown on a whole different scale. Making coffee, as we know, is a very long and complex process that competes on quality rather than quantity on a global stage. However, the large majority of pineapple farms and exports stress the opposite, quantity over quality. This is due to the relatively simple process of growing pineapples where you plant a baby, wait for it to grow, harvest the babies that it produces to maximize yield, and finally wait for it to grow a pineapple. 

That being said, there are two distinct ways of growing pineapples, conventional and organic farming. The main difference between these two methods of pineapple farming is that organic farming looks to sustainably grow pineapples so that they are healthy, quality, and won’t harm the land after they are harvested. Conventional farming on the other hand typically favors quantity over quality only rejecting 5% of all pineapples they produce while organic farmers tend to reject around 35%. Since they focus on scale rather than condition, these conventional farms will more likely use chemical fertilizers and pesticides than more biodegradable options used on organic farms. However, just like coffee, pineapples face a challenge with weather change as well. Predicting the climate is normally very simple in Costa Rica, with the dry season between November and May and the wet season between May and November. Recently Costa Rican farmers have been facing a difficult shift in this pattern where the climate will become unpredictable with it raining when it’s not supposed to for long periods of time. 

The Costa Rican farmers are trying their best to prepare the plants for all sorts of weather and treat them when something unpredictable happens, but that can only work for so long. Another problem many of these pineapple and coffee farms are facing alike is the dwindling number of workers. The majority of those who work these farms come from Nicaragua or are other immigrants, they make up over 80% of the workforce on these farms. Every year the number of these workers decreases so the best thing the owners of these farms can do is advertise the benefits that they offer. At the pineapple farm we visited, many of the houses in the surrounding area were secondary homes owned by Costa Ricans that they rent to these immigrant workers and is an example of one of these benefits. However, if it were me I would rather work on the coffee farm where they provide housing on the premises, daycare, and even an education for the children. In my eyes, the coffee farms seem to be more inclined to provide benefits to their workers than the pineapple farms do and so I believe picking coffee cherries would be more beneficial in the long run than harvesting pineapples.