Chiquita Brands International
From The Matrix
[edit] Chiquita Brands International, Inc.
Corporate headquarters address:
250 East Fifth Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202 USA
Chiquita is a global company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, with 26,000 full-time employees and operations on six continents. Established in 1885 by Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker and Andrew Preston as Boston Fruit Company. Chiquita produces and distributes bananas and other fresh fruits and vegetables under a variety of brands, including Chiquita, Amigo, and Premium. Chiquita owns approximately 90,000 acres (36,400 hectares) and lease about 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares) of land in Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras. Chiquita also grows bananas on the Ivory Coast, Philippines and Australia. The company also owns power plants, warehouses, irrigation systems, wharves and a railroad.
Chiquita emerged from a pre-arranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002, giving bondholders a 95.5 percent stake for a $700 million reduction in the company's debt. Wachovia Corporation owns about ten percent of Chiquita.
Key People:
Fernando Aguirre, 46
Chairman, Pres, CEO
John Braukman, III, 50
CFO, Sr. VP
Chris Augustijns, 49
Pres of Chiquita Fresh Group - Asia
Robert Kistinger, 51
Pres and COO of the Company's Chiquita Fresh Group
$ 1.78M salary*
Robert Olson, 58
Sr. VP, Gen. Counsel and Sec.
$ 1.19M salary*
*Dollar amounts are as of 31-Dec-03, "Pay" is salary, bonuses, etc.
In 1998 Cincinnati Enquirer reporters Mike Gallagher & Cameron McWhirter undertook a wide-ranging investigation into Chiquita's business practices. They conducted scores of interviews in the United States, traveled to Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, and the Caribbean islands of St. Lucia and Dominica. They spoke to a wide range of sources, including farm laborers and managers, environmentalists, government officials, financial experts, lawyers, professors and other sources. Their exposé was published in a front-page series, which received international attention.
Their report prompted a protest from Chiquita, which launched an investigation into Gallagher's research methods. In July 1999, Mike Gallagher was sentenced to five years probation and 200 hours of community service for illegally accessing the voicemail system of produce giant Chiquita Brands International. Gallagher admitted breaking into Chiquita's voicemail system while researching the company's alleged mistreatment of workers at its Central American produce farms. A former Chiquita lawyer, George Ventura, supplied Gallagher with access codes to the company's voicemail system.
The Enquirer subsequently fired Gallagher, renounced the stories with a series of front-page apologies, and paid Chiquita more than $10 million in an out-of-court settlement. Despite the controversy surrounding the Enquirer investigation, current Chiquita-related events that are causing alarm include:
"We have observed with concern the worsening labor situation in your company's banana plantations, in particular the violations of human and workers' rights and of the freedom to organize trade unions, conflicts over collective agreements, abuses of working hours..." said German Zepeda, Central American ("Coordination") union leader, in a letter to Chiquita.
Contaminated water: When workers sought an increase in their poverty-level wages and began to organize unions on Guatemalan plantations, known as Arizona and Alabama, the employer fired the workers' leaders. When workers came to the defense of the leaders, the owner shut down the plantation, closed their kids' school, and stopped purifying the workers' water supply.
Workers say their children now suffer from a variety of diseases. Chiquita has an environmental charter that states its commitment to clean water. These plantations have supplied Chiquita with bananas for the past decade;
Lack of housing: On the Isa Grande plantation in Costa Rica, a Chiquita supplier, wages are poverty-level at about $27 a week, and workers say they must spend four hours a day going back and forth to work because the owner refuses to build housing on the plantations;
Exposure to pesticides: Workers on plantations that have supplied Chiquita bananas say that they use pesticides without protective gear and are subjected to aerial spraying while they are in the fields. This is despite Chiquita's efforts to distinguish itself from its competitors as an environmental leader.
Denial of the right to organize: In Costa Rica the Chiquita union won 17 court rulings against the company because of firings and other discrimination against union members, according to a human rights group in that country.
Sources:
Chiquita Brands International, http://www.chiquita.com/
Banana Action Net, Coordinadora Latinoamericano de Sindicatos Bananeros, Secretariat in Honduras c.o.Cosibah, E-mail:cosibah@globalnet.hn, http://bananas.xs4all.be/
Global Exchange, 2017 Mission Street, #303, San Francisco, CA, 94110, http://www.globalexchange.org/
Institute for Global Ethics, Camden, Maine 04843, http://www.globalethics.org/
