Australia grows bananas. Australia is the most expensive country in the world to buy bananas. Does not compute.
It’s one of the biggest shocks when you first move to Australia. Bananas are just ridiculously expensive. I’ve seen banana prices as high as 15 dollars a kilogram, a more normal price is 10 and I was amazed to see it as low as 5 yesterday as I picked up three large bananas for a shade under 2 dollars.
In the UK I used to pop next door to Tesco metro and buy an individual banana, fair trade and shipped in from the Carribean, for 15p to go with my breakfast. A bunch of bananas could easily be picked up for less than a pound.
So why does a country that produces bananas have ridiculously high prices?
I’ve chatted to locals about this and the answers I got were “We’re paying fair wages and not employing slave labour” and ”Australia is a huge country with a highly dispersed population and it takes a lot to ship goods around.”
Not sure if I really buy either of those explanations. Fair trade bananas in the UK are massively cheaper, sometimes by a factor of ten or more. One of the things Fair trade means is that workers are paid fair living wages.
How much labour goes in to banana cultivation? I appreciate there is a lot of effort involved but I don’t see it as the most labour intensive industry around.
I think the high minimum wage in Australia is great. It really does make the place a more equal and fair country. I don’t see that as a reason to rip off consumers in supermarkets though.
As for high transportation costs. Try shipping bananas across the world with associated fuel costs and import duties. I just can’t believe that transporting goods within the same country, even a large one like Australia, is more expensive than that.
The real reason that bananas are so expensive in Australia seems to be lack of competition. No foreign banana imports are allowed in to the country so there is no price competition.
Tough import restrictions and quarantine laws enforce this.
One of the reasons given for this is to stop potential disease from foreign bananas. Obviously that’s a valid concern but it shouldn’t be used as a bogey man to put an end to all imports. Surely there could be some checks and restrictions only placed when there is good reason to believe a crop may be infected.
The people benefit from artificially high banana prices are the small band of growers and distributors and those who suffer are the mass of Australians who consume the product. It’s like an extra tax except the proceeds go to already rich individuals rather than society.
Australia should open up the doors to free competition and give other banana producing countries a fair go. If people are willing to pay extra for “high quality” Australian bananas then that will be made clear at the tills.