The best variety is Gors Michel, and its genes are the same another differently named cultvar in Malaysia and Indonesia from where bananas originated. Click for what is going where nowadays from BananaLink  How British supermarkets bruising banana workers.Have a look at Natural History Museum’s Seeds of Trade to see what went where. Lots of botanists explain the movements in terms of biology (eg coconuts can survive transportationover thousands of miles).  Certainly, when I studied ‘Tropical Crops’ with Prof Purseglove (ex Director of Trinidad Tropical University and author of classis ‘Tropical Crops Vol 1-4, he said the crops grow where they do because they escape their original pests and diseases.  But on closer inspection it was often the case that just a few specimens were responsible for a whole continent. Which means that they are vulnerable – just as bananas are now under threat because they have a uniformity that is susceptible to fungal disease attack (Bananageddon according to FAO), A more diversified population  - ie where it originated, means that a few are likely to survive so that they can  help recovery.

So what about the tea plantation? I worked with some of the tea pickers’ unions in Sri Lanka. They were predominantly Tamil, having been brought by the Brits from India (Tamil Nadu). In colonial speak, ‘ they are good well ordered workers’. I remember taking a photo of a group opf women picking and said to my union colleague: “Is it all right to give them a few roubles to say thank you?”. “No” he said,” that would be far too much, they couldn’t cope”. Understanding wages in the tea industry. I was also told why ‘Tamil’ is now synonymous with ‘Tiger’. Following independence, the Brits have given Tamils certain rights, including the right for Tamil to be an official language. But socialist prime minister Bandranaike  halved the tea plantations, saying that they did not want to depend  so much on one crop. “Good idea!”, we all shouted. But she gave the land that was released to the Sinhalese – the ‘local’ people, who made good use of that land. However the Tamils said –“Hang on, we have worked this land for generations, shouldn’t we have some of it?”. “No” was the reply – in Sinhalese as the Tamil language was not official anymore.  This is part of why Tamils wanted their own land in Northern Sri Lanka.

The relationship of labour and the land is endless but usually ignored. Between what the plant can do and what labour can do determines what is grown where. As the slave plantations growing sugar decreased in the North of Brazil, the coffee plantations in the south developed. But not with the old slave families. Instead because the climate is less tropical,  immigrants from Europe came in and contracts were made with them to go and plant coffee. They were given some land for themselves, and then move on and do the same for four years. When they could come back and start harvesting the berries. But coffee berries ripen fast, so not ideal for big plantations. So each a bit different, but the basic – monocultures and migrants are common elements. Now there are plantations in Palm Oil (Modern Slavery in the Oil Plantation Industry), Vegetables, but the overall pattern is  the same.

Picture of why plantations popular? Again according to PP Courtney ‘the advantages of plantations of the planation by contrast with the small holding are very considerable, and may be grouped into financial technical and commercial.  The principal financial advantage of the plantation is its access to risk capital from the money markets of the world and its credit worthiness.”[1] (see annex for more)

There has probably been a decline in tropical plantations as they looked after WW2, as more forms of farming have come into the long supply chains. (more D Lincoln).  But while the classic plantations may have gone off the radar of the ILO, they are reappearing in Europe, only with different migrant workers.

Plantations moved

In South Africa 'we have vegetable plantations but unorganised yet' my union contact told me.And the plantation model was moved from the tropics to more temperate lands. So now there are plantations to get the vegetables out in Spain and England.  And, as always it is migrant workers who do the work. Many have to use their pay to buy foodstuffs from the owners. Certainly the big owners are aware of H&S and quality audits. Unions find it very difficult to recruit on them  – when one did  and won the right to holiday entitlement, found there wasn’t a job to go back to. I have heard workers calling them ‘open prisons’. Bernard Mathews – he of ‘ Turkey twizzler’  fame, was recently on the Despatches programme, and faired quite well. Despite this, the company introduced a mobile phone ban on site, to prevent pictures or videos being taken. Nobody is allowed one on their person whatsoever. Security is like prison camp with patrols constantly circling the perimeter and patrolling the corridors, to carry out spot checks.

The plantation owners have just helped bring about the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board. The Fresh Produce Consortium prefer to call themselves ’horticulturalists’ pushed to remove the right of farmworkers, but in particular migrant workers, to have slightly more than the national minimum wage. Apparently it was  “too costly”. But not so costly as to prevent their Annual dinner at the Savoy where they were met by small group of farmworker protestors. The NFU supported them. The retailers remained silent. But it was the plantation owners in the East who pushed for this, not the family farms in the West. Most family farms get on with things and the AWB made it easy to do that. So Wales was successful in holding on to their part of the ‘England & Wales’ Board. Scotland and N. Ireland still have theirs. It is only England, with the big plantations which has lost it. (for much more see 'Save our Agricultural Wages Board). The same 'Fresh Produce Consortium' lobbied the government in 2013 to open up ways to attract migrant workers from outside the EU saying that they will need migrant workers from Russia, Turkey and Ukraine, because they are worried that Rumanian and Bulgarian migrant workers will clear off to warm bars and coffee shops, as they get full EU status More in Financial Times

Multimillionaires and the NFU President P Kendall (arable baron with over 600 acres) went to EU to stop them putting a cap on CAPsubsidies. The EU wanted a cap on CAP funds going to any one person to £1/4million. Those CAP funds just go to landowners. And to earn that they have to do  nothing. Just for owning the land, each receives about £100/acre. So the bigger landowner you are the more money you get. So our rich said they did not want any limit, and David Cameron went to the EU to argue their case saying that this would discourage further amalgamation of large farms – presumably plantation style operations..

Most of the land here is owned by exceedingly wealthy people (1% own more than 50%). Some of them are millionaires from elsewhere, sheikhs, oligarchs and mining magnates who own vast estates in this country, where their plantations are like subcontractors. They may not pay taxes in the UK, yet they receive millions in farm subsidies @ £100/acre, for doing nothing. So while  UKippers shout about migrants who come here to work in appalling conditions on plantations, their owners, the most successful benefit tourists, get no mention.

Nevertheless Modern Slavery is on the agenda. he Home Office Report last week said that there are an estimated 10-13,000 slaves in Britain, supporting the need to introduce Modern Slavery Bill going through parliament now.  This figure was reached by a new method of analysis MSE. Modern slavery can be defined as ‘human trafficking or ‘forced labour’. It is the latter that is most common in the food supply chains. JRCT Report on Forced Labour last year chronicled many of the goings on. Last year, The Minister Karen Bradley reckoned that nearly 20% of all UK slaves are in the food and agriculture chain. While the Gangmasters Licensing Authority was set up in the wake of the Chinese cockle pickers tragedy, a previous Director of GLA told me that they have probably made a good job on the top tier, but find it much harder when labour is subby sub –contracted several tiers. While the GLA were involved in the Home Office report it is hard to see how the MSE estimates relate with just farm/food. If the Minister and MSE are both about right, it means around 2,000 -2,500 people are in forced labour in the farm/food supply chain in the UK. Home Office YOU TUBE

Eric Williams, Walter Rodney and Karl Marx all contended that the global capitalist economy was largely founded on the creation and produce of thousands of slave labour camps based in colonial plantations exploiting tens of millions of abducted Africans. I wonder what that K Marx would have had to say – about the newer vegetative  version.  It is more than just a scrap in a few fields in the Eastern England, but much of Europe has similar models of production, undermining more sustainable forms of farming. The ILO Convention on Plantations is antiquated and needs to be bought up to date for temperate countries. Plantations once defined colonialism and post colonialism, but the social historians seem to have lost track of this new temperate version.

Annex 1