Ecotourism part 4

Currently, ecotourism is the fastest growing sector within tourism in general. What that means is that ecotourism is becoming a force to be reckoned with because tourism is such a huge service industry. That being said, there are some problems in the industry. Because of the diversity of flora and fauna and the beauty of Costa Rica, this has become a huge part of the economy. The stability of the government here also attracts visitors more so than other central american countries. It is also pretty close to America, a 4 hour flight from Atlanta, so tourists do not have to adjust to a significant time change or any major culture shock. A lot of people speak english (although definitely not all, like tour books lead people to believe), and the higher standard of living also attract tourists. There are over 1 million tourists/year that visit Costa Rica producing over $1 billion in revenue. Most of the tourists come from North or South America, although Germany and Spain also provide a decent amount of tourists. All this ecotourism, which is sustainable and healthy in somewhat small doses, has begun to get overcrowded in Costa Rica due to the 6% increase in tourism numbers each year. Some national parks have been littered in and animals are used to humans feeding them, thus changing the whole ecosystem. Also, there is some greenwashing done by high end hotels and other resorts that are near ecologically interesting tourist attractions. These hotels claim to be good for the environment or different than normal hotels but in actuality they are just as bad for nature. Often times there is a lack of enforcement by rangers in the national parks, and closed areas areas are sometimes intruded on by reckless guides that don't care about doing damage to the environment and just want tourist money. All this tourism has both helped and hurt the economy. It helps by bringing tourists to spend money here and transferring money from wealthy countries to third world locales where many people are living in totally different ways compared to developed nations. Some bad things are that local people who only speak spanish can be exploited or ignored by tourist companies and left to their own business, not getting part of the economic pie that tourism bakes. The attraction that tourists go to see may interrupt the natural cycle of things surrounding a peasants home in the countryside by driving by in big buses and littering, but nothing is done to compensate them. 

Bananas part 4

We finally got to go see a banana plantation! On Friday, after leaving La Selva, we headed to Chiquita. There we visited a Guayacán farm on which Chiquita grows its bananas. The plantation was a sort of experimental farm for Chiquita, trying out new methods to be more sustainable and better for the environment. The plantation is connected to a large forested area which is kind of a preserve. It was saved so that animals can travel through the corridor to a different national forest. Anyway, we learned that bananas are not native to Costa Rica which is the reason for all the chemicals that are used to help the bananas grow or pesticides to keep bugs from infesting them. These pesticides and chemicals are eventually drained into local rivers and things because of the elaborate system of aquaducts/ditches (i cant remember the word that is used for dispersing water on farms) goes between all the plants. The bananas have to have a specific amount of water, not too much or they will drown and not too little or the plants will die.
The way bananas grow is pretty interesting. First of all, bananas are not a tree. They are a plant, and the banana group begins as a flower. The flower takes 9 months to mature and turn into a bunch of bananas, and as they ripen, plastic bags are put over the bananas to protect them from bugs. Because this plantation is the main eco-friendly project for Chiquita, these bags are recycled and reused, but on most plantations this doesn´t happen and often times these bags are found in the ocean or other random places along the drainage ditches.

This plantation takes extra care to make sure their workers are safe. These methods include wearing a long sleeve shirt (oh yeah, im sure that does a lot) and a mask. Workers also get their blood tested every 3 months to make sure that they are doing okay, but all these methods dont really seem to be that effective. To me, it seems kind of fake. They do all these things to pretend that they care about their workers, but in actuality, these methods are just to look nice and don´t seem very effective. The health of the workers is still largely at risk, and the company looks the other way because they are doing a tiny bit to act like they care.

We got to see their packaging plant, and it seemed to be safe overall. The workers looked happy and had simple jobs like washing off the bananas, throwing out the ones that looked flawed so they could be used in baby food and other things, putting stickers on each banana by hand, or packing the bananas up in boxes to be shipped to America and Europe. We also witnessed the crazy Chiquita Banana Show, where local women try to become actresses and follow a cheesy script explaining how the bananas are grown and processed. It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my whole trip, along with the Cafe Britt show, and was hard to understand because it was all in Spanish. They had outrageous costumes and wore makeup to look like men. At one point the women grabbed some guys hands and made them dance in a circle. It was awkward to say the least, and one of the women had disturbingly sweaty hands. They took us out to the banana field for an extension of the bizarre show where they showed us the plants. Every banana plant is tied down to the ground with multiple ropes because the plants are too big to hold themselves up, which is one again an example of why bananas probably shouldnt be grown in Costa Rica. This will never change most likely. Overall, the plantation was very interesting and demonstrated some big problems that Chiquita has some not-so-effective solutions to try and fix.

Coffee part 4

The economics of coffee: pricing, different classifications, and middlemen.

Here in Costa Rica there are different prices for coffee compared to in America. According to my research, that is because America imports over 1200 thousand tons of coffee each year while Costa Rica imports no coffee since it is grown here. The demand is normal and the supply is high, while in America the demand is high and the supply is lower. Here, a 1 lb bag of Cafe Britt coffee is $5, but in America it is $9 plus the shipping for it to get there. At the award-winning Del Cafe... Tal, we could purchase coffee for $10/lb while in America large scale stores like Starbucks purchase it for $15/lb. This mark-up is not necessarily seen by the producer themselves but more likely by middlemen, unless significant effort has been put forth in order to eliminate them like in Daisy's case. Also, you can buy coffee directly from foreign producers and will most likely get a better deal rather than going through a large intermediary. Starbucks even sells a Costa Rican coffee called Tarrazu that is 1 lb for $13, and it is out of stock on their website. The description is full of fluff to make the coffee sound different and great. Examples of this are "single-origin coffee offers vibrant flavors and a refreshing acidity" and "vibrant and refreshing coffee is complemented by bright, fruity flavors like lemon, strawberry, peach and pineapple". I believe almost none of this superfluous marketing ploy.

Once again, the price of coffee depends on its classification. The price varies significantly if the coffee is Fair Trade, organic, organic certified, shade-grown, or sungrown. Some of these methods are healthier for the environment in general, while others are not, so it is up to a eco-friendly consumer to purchase the more expensive coffee. Since I do not drink coffee, I don't know if there would be a difference in the taste between all these classifications but I'm assuming not.

The Caribbean

we just got back from the caribbean which was awesome.

thursday: In the morning we visited a medical supplies place called Makol. We learned about the medical sector of the economy and how cutthroat socialized health care is in Costa Rica. The hospitals, run by the government, are narrow minded and only buy the cheapest product, even when in the long run or bigger packaging they would get better deals. The hotels also have no way of inventorying things, so when an order comes to Makol, who is only a distributor, products are needed ASAP. We also learned that the socialized health care system works well when you have a life threatening problem, but if you just have a normal check up, you could be put on a waiting list for over a year. Kind of a flawed system. Costa Rica is also having problems with Nicaraguans illegally entering the country using their socialized health care and schooling systems without paying for anything through taxes (see any resemblance to the United States and illegal Mexican immigrants? I do). 

After the stop we drove to La Selva (The Jungle) research station. Here we went on a few nature walks and relaxed. We saw some monkeys that got pretty close to us on our afternoon walk which was neat, and we also saw the tiny tiny tree frogs for which Costa Rica is famous. A few students opted to walk around at night but we didnt see anything. Nevertheless, it was extremely scary because we had no idea what we could run into and didn't have a guide. We stayed overnight, had a short morning walk, and drove to Chiquita. There we saw this ridiculous show, the packaging factory, lunch, got bug bites for the first time, and drove for a long time to Puerto Viejo. On the drive we finished off the Bourne movie trilogy, 2 movies in a row, and it was fantastically distracting. 

Puerto Viejo, on the caribbean coast, was kind of shady town to say the least but was still fun. I was offered drugs multiple times, but that will happen in a Rastafarian-dominated place. We had dinner and went out on the town. 

saturday: We got up early and drove to Cahuita national park to go snorkeling. I finally got some fins that were actually the correct size and a better snorkel which made me very happy. We saw lots of coral and fish, and even a decent sized stingray in the water. The water was very shallow water compared to the Osa, but was kind of murky. After snorkeling for a while, we had to switch out with this other group so we sat on the beach for awhile. There, we came face to face with white face monkeys right next to us. I could have touched them if I wanted, and they were obviously used to human interaction. They even tried to steal this lady's purse. We also saw a yellow eyelash pit viper (a very small but bright yellow cool snake) and a sloth that was high up in the tree.

 After lunch we drove to Manazillo, a very small town close to Puerto Viejo. It was what one of our teachers refered to as a "postcard beach". Our hotel, Hotel Las Palmas, was amazing, very nice accommodations. It was definitely the best place we had stayed at which made everyone happy. The beach was clean and isolated so there were no large groups of tourists, no sketchy people trying to sell drugs or crappy crafts, just the ocean and nice hotel rooms. It was great. A group of us stayed up all night to attempt to see the sunrise over the ocean, but we were up and the cloud cover prevented us from seeing it happen unfortunately.

sunday: After very little sleep we got up to eat breakfast and a small group went to the actual town of Manzanillo. We went on a little walk to see Panama and this cool view. It was very hot. We also walked around the town and surrounding houses and saw some interesting things. We went back to our hotel for lunch where I had a great hamburger, hung out at the pool and ocean, and relaxed again which was glorious. This was one of the first times that we could actually just sit around and relax and not have to be going going going doing lots of different activities. We ate a good dinner (our hotel had fantastic food), watched strange movies on tv while falling asleep, and made a bonfire on the beach. I slept really well.

monday: Drove back to Puerto Viejo to hang out for 2 hours and eat lunch, JC/me/paul/peter rented moped/scooter things for an hour whcih was the best thing ever. Everyone except me had near-death experiences, right in front of the place we rented them from. We also ate at Peace & Love Pizzeria, which was some of the best pizza I've ever consumed. Then we drove home. It was a good day

Coffee part 3

Coffee has some problems when it is not shade-grown. These coffee plants need direct sunlight to grow and are 3X as productive as shade grown coffee, which makes it extremely attractive to companies or plantation owners. Since there is no need for forests with this kind of coffee, often times jungles are cut down to create land in order to grow this coffee. This isn't just bad because of the deforestation, erosion of the soil due to lack of deep tree roots, and elimination of diversity of flora and fauna, but also because sungrown coffee needs pesticides which may end up draining into local rivers and polluting the groundwater. Over 2/3rds of land under pasture in Costa Rica (meaning plantations or fields) is subject to high erosion risk. When you consider how much of the economy is based on agriculture, that adds up to be a signficant amount of erroded soil that can't be helped due to the original deforestation used to clear the land for the agricultural plants. Also, as we learned at Cafe Britt, more than 70% of the coffee bean is actually discarded, including multiple layers of shells and other non-edible parts, which often ended up as waste in streams. As the bean is processed, it is soaked in water for a day to get the gelatinous coating off of the bean. Sometimes, this water was disposed of incorrectly into local streams causing pulp buildup in streams surrounding plantations and sugar to be in the water which ends up taking some oxygen out of the water, killing everything that was living. Thankfully, the Costa Rican government decided to enact a pollution control law in 1995 that makes sure that solid and liquid waste are properly disposed of.

Eco-tourism part 3

We had an extension of ecotourism this past weekend. We went to the Osa Peninsula, which I already talked about somewhat. The Osa Peninusla is part of a huge national park in the southern pacific side of Costa Rica, Corcovado National Park. It covers over 100,000 acres of land, and is very difficult to access so there aren´t a ton of beachy tourists. Our hotel/tent place that we stayed at did a few things that were sustainable, which surprised me. Because of the limited food resources and things like that in the middle of nowhere (actually named Drake Bay, Costa Rica), the food scraps are fed to a pig that lived near the hotel. The master plan is to fatten up the pig with the scraps and feast on him later, which is pretty smart but old school. Rumor has it that they also had their own personal cow out back whos milk was served at breakfast. Warm, unpasturized milk that hasn´t been processed to 2 or 1% or skim doesn´t taste all that bad actually. The hotel had limited power sources and didn´t use lights during the day and the dining area was pretty dark at night. Even though this hotel was kind of like camping, it was still luxurious to a certain extent which surprised me.

The snorkelling that we did was also an extension of our ecotourism trip. Observing local fish in their natural habitat while limiting the human effects on the environment is what ecotourism is all about. While we did ride in gasoline powered boats and we did put ourselves in the coral reef to examine fish and other wildlife, this type of tourism in preserved waters is still not awful for the environment like other kinds of ecotourism. I always cringe when I think about the bus that we have taken all over the country because I know that the fumes coming out are very strong and definitely not good for the world and CO2 emission problems.

Bananas part 3

Dangerous bananas? Yes, its true. Bananas can be extremely harmful to the health of the environment and plantation workers. This post will be about the problems that plantations and their overseeing corporations have when it comes to the general health of the world. There are problems with the rights of immigrants and human rights, violations of labor standards, pesticide runoff problems, and deforestation in order to expand plantations. There is a major project/ group in Costa Rica that has been formed to help change the environmental conditions of banana growth, and it is called the FORO EMAUS or Emaus Forum in English. They have problems fighting against powerful corporations unwilling to change, political parties, and mass media. Another problem is the consumer. Because people in America and Europe prefer bananas to not only taste good but look good too, extra pesticides and chemicals not necessary to the health and taste of the bananas are used. I feel that if people realized that bananas that look okay but not great taste the same and are better for the environment, there might be a market for that specific product. Bananas weren't originally meant to grow in Costa Rica. The plant is from Asia, and this is the underlying reason why so many harmful chemicals have to be used to assist in the growht of the plants. Some chemicals used in banana production have been so harmful to workers in the past that they became sterile and unable to have children. The problem with some corporations is the fact that they sometimes refuse to comply with Costa Rican laws and other international "requirements" in the banana agricultural sector. Spraying the pesticides by airplane and not by hand also expands the affected regions because the pesticides are airborn and can be blown around by the wind to where some workers may live. After many years of pesticides being used, the ground often becomes saturated and unable to grow anything becasue of the chemical content. A way that workers can protect themselves is by joining unions, so nearly 90% of all banana plantation workers are part of the union UTRAL and many file complaints about working conditions, which is why they have improved significantly in recent years.

The weekend (aka saturday-weds)

On Saturday we went to the pacuare river to white water raft. It was about an hour and a half away from San Jose, up more mountains and around windy roads which we’ve become accustomed to. We had to get up really early again in order to leave by 6:30 to make it for breakfast at the white water rafting place. We tried to get only guys in our raft in order to paddle stronger and faster, and we almost succeeded but didn’t. We had a little briefing session in the van on the way up to the river., but not super detailed. Once again I felt unsafe, but oh well. There were class 2-4 rapids Most people in our boat got tossed out at one point or another, and it was really really fun. Probably one of my favorite parts of this entire trip. Going down the river, we were in the middle of the jungle which was quite breathtaking. Unfortunately, my camera is not waterproof so I have no pictures. We even got to see native Costa Ricans (like indians) along the side of the river at points which was pretty cool. We were in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Our guide was great, and nobody was seriously injured thankfully. We ate lunch on the river and swam around, and after lunch we rafted for another hour. I realized that being in the front of the boat is 50 times more fun than being in the back because you get splashed and its just out of control. After we finished, we went back to San Jose and pretty much everyone just crashed at home since we had to get up even earlier the next day to leave for the Osa Peninsula on the pacific coast near Panama.

Sunday, we had a very long bus ride to the Osa Peninsula, including a moment when we had to get off the bus so it could "perform a somewhat dangerous manuever" which involved students pushing the bus from behind so it could bottom out on a tiny bridge. We had to ride on boats to get to the town we were staying in on the peninsula, and the ride was really fun. We went through a forest on the boat (pictures to explain that will come later) and got to go pretty fast out on the open ocean. We got to our camp/tents/nice place that would serve as our hotel for 3 days and everyone got to relax which was wonderful. Dinner was delicious too which made the travel day much better.

Monday we had another early morning, around 7am, to go to the corcovado national park which we had to ride a boat to. This trip has been so crazy for our normal schedules as college students considering all the early mornings. There were 3 groups of about 10 students, and luckily I had a really crazy guide who also worked at the hotel we stayed at. He was in tune with nature to the fullest and hadn't worn shoes voluntarilly in 15 years. He let us on the trail and had us eat termites if we wanted (which taste like wood/dirt but are extremely healthy), eat some kind of muscle thing that was growing on a rock in the ocean, and swim in the this swimming hole that was at the base of a stream coming out of the peninsula that lead to the ocean. We saw lots of bugs like spiders and leaf cutter ants and even a jaguar footprint in the dirt. We also saw tracks of the Tapir on the sand. The Tapir is the largest mammal in the park, and kind of looks like an anteater. We headed back for lunch and saw a half-eaten sea otter that we had to wade past which was pretty repulsive. After we ate lunch and hung out at the beach, all the groups went to the waterfall. My crazy guide lead a small group of us from this little waterfall everyone was at (about 6 feet tall) to a the huge waterfall upstream that was probably 30-40 feet tall. We climbed up rock faces and there were multiple times that I thought I was going to slip and fall off of it and die, but luckily there were no fatalities. After the waterfall visit we took the boats back to our hotel and played cards until dinner and after dinner. This weekend was full of more cards than I've ever played in my lifetime probably.

The next day we went by boat to rainy boat ride to the island where we went snorkeling. The water was clear blue which was gorgeous, and the coral reef we were over was pretty far down so to get a close look at the fish you had to dive down a little bit. We also hung out on the beach for a little bit and then went home early for fear of being trapped on the island by what seemed to be an incoming storm. Most people went to sleep in their tents when we got home but I wasn't tired so I read outside and thoroughly enjoyed the awesome view from my deck. I slept a little before dinner since everyone else was still sleeping and then hung out with everyone at night.

On wednesday we road the boat back to the town where we left our bus and had the longest bus ride ever. It was a long day.

itinerary until i leave
Thursday, June 5, Leave to La Selva Research Station, Caribbean (BRING MU T-SHIRT)
Friday-sunday, chill in the puerto viejo, go to banana plantations,
Monday, June 9, Return to San Jose
Tuesday, June 10, Class, Lunch, Class
Wed, June 11, Evals., Group Reports, lunch, Final Exam
Thur, June 12, Poas and water falls visit (no swimming) (BRING MU T-SHIRT)
Fri, June 13, Free day, packing, Farewell Dinner
Sat, June 14, fly home