By Edwin Smit
Being Dutch, an agronomist and the distributor in Costa Rica for the world’s biggest producer and supplier of biological products for pest and disease control (insects, mites, fungi, etc.) the pineapple story in Costa Rica is much more than déjà vu to me. I was born and raised in Holland, the “Garden of Europe,” a greenhouse area where mainly flowers, pot plants and vegetables are produced. To get an idea, the annual turnover of the flower auction in my village is twice as much as the yearly turnover of all Central American horticultural exports together – in figures, $6.5 billion (2010, Flower Auction Flora Holland).
In Holland, we have faced our problems. We are (and were) the biggest producer of tomatoes, roses and many other vegetable crops, pot plants and cut flowers. In the 1980s, Dutch horticulture was under siege from supermarket chains, environmentalists and last but not least, non-governmental organizations because of social and environmental issues. The general response was to deny it all.
Technically speaking, we were right. We were taking better care of the environment than our competitors and we also treated our work force much better than countries like Spain, Kenya or Ecuador. Nevertheless, we did have one big problem. We were the biggest. And whom do you blame when someone needs to be blamed? The biggest.
Unfortunately, they kept blaming us until 1993, when Holland lost a great part of its tomato exports to its biggest client, Germany. According to the Germans, we were selling them “water bombs” (tomatoes without any taste). There was no way to defend ourselves anymore; we had to come up with something else. And we did.
We invited the environmentalists, the supermarkets and the NGOs and started defining joint strategies. We did not blame them anymore for what they were accusing us of; we invited them to share their ideas with us and to come up with new plans. And we did, together.
Nowadays, Holland is still by far the biggest worldwide producer of flowers and pot plants and is leading Europe in vegetables. But we were never again accused of exporting water bombs.
Reading the pineapple articles in The Tico Times (TT, June 10) brings me back to the 80’s and early 90’s when I still lived in Holland. Costa Rica has become for the first time in its agricultural history a worldwide leader. Pineapple is the name of the game. And what happens? Costa Rica is being accused of irregularities in exactly the same way as any other country will be accused as soon as it becomes a world market leader. Let’s try to learn from others. Let’s change our attitude and invite all of the organizations, media and whoever is against what is happening here in Costa Rica. But let’s first define a clear strategy.
Public and private organizations should join forces and start looking for examples like the ones in Holland. It makes absolutely no sense at all to deny “what is going on” in Costa Rica, even if it isn’t true. Of course, our pineapple growers comply with all regulations set by Tesco, Global Gap or other organizations. But every producer from any country is obliged to do the same, otherwise you just do not end up on (European) supermarket shelves.
I invite you all to learn from mistakes made by others. Costa Rica is too vulnerable not to do so. Not just the international position of our pineapple sector is at stake, but so is the image of the whole country. The main pillar of our economy is tourism and recent notices on pineapples certainly do not convince tourists to come to the “paradise named Costa Rica.”
Everybody who knows me knows that I have been fighting for the past 10 years to improve Costa Rican produce and its image in the international market. But we certainly do have to become realistic on how to act in international markets. We need to grow up!
Edwin Smit is director of Reflex Centroamérica S.A. and Central American distributor for Koppert Biological Systems, a company that specializes in biological crop protection. He has worked in international horticulture for the past 20 years.
