It’s been a while since I’ve posted; lots of travel. I’m in Sydney, Australia right now, and I’m surprised at the wide variety of banana prices here. Australia is a major banana-growing nation, so it doesn’t need to import (though banana disease might change that.) In a one-hour walk through town, I saw some pretty divergent costs. What’s key – see the analysis at the end of this entry – is that Aussie prices probably, for better and worse, reflect our banana future.
Not the Trader Joe's price.
First up, the above fruit, at five for 5.00. That’s not per kilo, that’s per fruit. With the Aussie dollar trading about even with U.S. currency, that’s the A NEW RECORD for fruit sold at a standard market – over $10USD per pound, and that’s a “special.” (Maybe my math is wrong. Let me know; I’m comparing at six ounces per fruit.) Compare that to Trader Joe’s, in the U.S., which sells bananas – imported from Latin America – five for a single buck.
A little better?
These go for $3.49 per kilo, or $1.58 per pound. Using the standard index of six ounces per fruit, that’s a pricey 59 cents per. Ouch.
More like it, but still…
This bunch, at the equivalent of 90 cents per pound U.S., was at Aldi, which bills itself as “Australia’s Cheapest Supermarket.” But even that’s a high price; no major U.S. supermarket chain that I know of charges more than 79 cents.
ANALYSIS: So, why the premium? One would think that since these are local fruit, prices would be much lower. Not so, for two reasons. Australia is a first-world country, which means that banana workers there are paid a living wage. That’s different than the U.S. system of banana economics, which still relies on exploitative labor arrangements in Latin America, source of all our fruit. Second, Australia isn’t looking at the Panama Disease scourge that threatens to wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop; it is fighting the disease now, with less-than-encouraging results (at least in the field. In the lab, things may be better. See my Australia page for related posts.) Supply and demand affects banana prices everywhere, as I wrote last year in the New York Times. Our future probably involves higher prices, because of banana disease, but it also isn’t crazy to wonder why third-world workers shouldn’t be paid a wage that would give them the same kind of economic status as Aussie banana laborers. But they’re not, and they suffer because of it – and because we insist on banana with record-shattering low prices, like these I recently saw on a Los Angeles street corner.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
