The Big Pineapple Pesticide Problem

And other dark truths about the pesticide-fuelled pineapple industry in Costa Rica, where the UK and U.S. gets most of its stock.

hink of every non-organic pineapple you eat as taking years off your life.” This was not something I expected to hear in my first few days of my soul-nourishing Costa Rican holiday. I’d actually been planning to spend it largely sipping, um, piña coladas, but meeting the agricultural community of Juanilama really put a spanner in the works.

I’m here with Intrepid Travel, a tour company focusing on sustainable, community-based tourism. Not only do they invest in local communities, you get to actually meet them – and and not in a superficial, performative way. Deep in the tropical northern Costa Rican countryside, I stayed in the home of one of the 200 women that make up the village.

As she showed us round her own small-scale, sustainable farmland, she told us about the devastating effects of the large-scale production of pineapples in Costa Rica, where big companies spray toxic pesticides to mass-produce fruits, which in turn hospitalise workers, poison locals, and destroy the environment. Black howler monkeys are turning yellow from eating polluted leaves. There’s illegal deforestation. Chemicals are left in pineapples that you and I eat (but more on this later). “Pineapples in Costa Rica,” she tells me bluntly, “are killing people.”