THE HISTORY OF BANANAS
On a December night in 1910, the former exiled leader of Honduras MANUEL BONILLA a borrowed yacht in New Orleans with a group heavily armed accomplices, he set sail on Honduras in hopes of reclaiming power by whatever means necessary . Bonilla had a powerful backer, the future leader of notorious organization known throughout Latin America as El Pulpo or, "the octopus", for its long reach, the infamous El Pulpo was a U.S. corporation trafficking in, of all things, bananas.
it was officially known as United Fruit company or Chiquita Brands international today.
The history of bananas cultivation in Southeast Asia goes back hundreds of year, and its reached the American continent in the early 1500s, where enslaved Africans cultivated them in plots alongside sugar plantations. There were many different bananas, most of which looked nothing like what's in your fridge.
In the 1800s, captains from New Orleans and New England ventured to the Caribbean in search of coconuts and other goods. They began to experiment with bananas, purchasing one kind, called the Gros Michel, known as Big Mike, from Afro-Caribbean farmers in Jamaica, Cuba, and Honduras. Gros Michel bananas produced large bunches of relatively thick-skinned and sweet-tasting fruit ideal for shipping.
By the end of the 1800s, bananas were a hit in the US. They were affordable, available year-round, and endorsed by medical doctors.
As bananas became big business, US. fruit companies wanted to grow their own bananas. In order to secure access to land, banana moguls lobbied and bribed government officials in Central America, and even funded coups to ensure they had allies in power. In Honduras, Manuel Bonilla repaid the banana man who financed his return to power with land concessions.
By the 1930s, one company dominated the region: United Fruit, that supported Manuel in returning to power in Honduras a while ago, and who owned over 40% of Guatemala's arable land at one point. They cleared rainforest in Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama to build plantation, along railroads, ports, and towns to house workers. Lured by relatively high-paying jobs, people migrated to banana zones. From Guatemala to Colombia, United Fruit's plantations grew exclusively Gros Michel bananas in Central America. These densely packed farms had little biological diversity, making them ripe for disease epidemics. The infrastructure connecting these vulnerable farms could quickly spread disease: pathogens could hitch a ride from one farm to another on workers boots, railroad cars, and steamships.
That's exactly what happened in the 1910s, when a fungus called TR-1 began to level Gros Michel banana plantations, slowly infecting across the region via the same system that had enabled big profits and cheap bananas.
In a race against "Panama Disease" banana companies abandoned in infected plantations in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala, leaving thousands of farmers and workers jobless. The companies flooded them (abandoned infected plantations)and then replanted crops somewhere else, often cutting down rainforest to do so.
After WW2, the dictatorship with wich United Fruit had partnered in Central America yielded to democratically elected governments that called for land reform. In Guatemala , President Jacob Arbenz tried to buy back land from United Fruit and redistribute it to landless farmers. The Arbenz government offered to pay a price based on tax records where United Fruit had underreported the value of the land. EL PULPO was not happy. The company launched propaganda campaigns against Arbenz and called on its deep connections in the US Government for help. Citing fears of communism, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow, of the democratically elected Arbenz in 1954.
That same year in Honduras, thousands of United Fruit workers went on strike until the company agreed to recognize a new labour union.
With the political and economic costs of running from Panama disease escalating, United Fruit switched from Gros Michel to another type of bananas that resist Panama disease and its called Cavendish bananas in the early 1960s. its bananas tasted good enough to keep consumers happy.
United fruit had saved itself from bankruptcy by filling its plantations with thousands of the new plants, copying the same monoculture growing conditions Gros Michel had thrived in.
While the operation was huge success for Latin American industry, the Cavendish banana itself is far from safe. In 2014, Southeast Asia, another major banana producer, exported four million tons of Cavendish bananas. But, in 2015, its exports had dropped by 46% thanks to a combination of a another strain of the fungus, TR-4, and bad weather.
Growing practices in Southeast Asia haven't helped matters. Growers can't always afford the expensive lab-based methods to clone plants from shoots with spreading the disease. Also they often aren't strict enough about cleaning farm equipment and quarantining inflected fields. As a result, the fungus has spread to Australia, the Middle East and Mozambique- and Latin America, heavily dependent on its monoculture Cavendish crops, could easily be next and leaving banana trade ripe for another pandemic.
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