John Soluri – Banana Cultures
30 September, 2021 -
examPrep
- 3 – The banana’s late-nineteenth-century transition from an exotic novelty to a commodity of mass consumption in the United States produced much more than new symbolic meanings for the fruit. A dramatic increase in production transformed lowland tropical landscapes and livelihoods from Mexico to Ecuador. Over the span of a century, workers felled forests and drained wetlands; planted, cultivated, and harvested bananas; built railroad tracks and entire towns; and prepared meals, laundered clothes, and raised children. This was not the first time that human initiative had transformed these regions, but the rate and scale of resource usewerewithout historical precedent. These environmental changes in turn helped to transform a low-input production process into one that was, and continues to be, both capital and labor intensive.
- This book traces the entwined environmental and social transformations that shaped the North Coast of Honduras between roughly 1870 and 1975. The story takes place primarily in and around banana farms, but the setting periodically shifts to the United States, where millions of people consumed bananas physically and symbolically. I follow the banana from farm to market in order to explore the dynamic relationship between mass production and mass consumption that drove, both directly and indirectly, environmental and social change on the North Coast. This transnational perspective also reveals that the fruit companies’ economic power derived from both their railroad and land monopolies in Central America and their control over mass markets in the United States. The discursive power of the ‘‘banana republic’’ metaphor makes it easy to overlook the ways in which monopoly capitalism in the United States shaped the twentieth-century history of the banana trade.
- In following the banana on its international journey, I cross the boundaries of several academic fields in order to write a history that is cross-fertilized by the perspectives of biologists and geographers in addition to those of cultural, environmental, and social historians.
- 5 – Once again, the shared assumption is that tropical landscapes, not unlike their inhabitants, are essentially passive, acted upon.// The story that follows challenges this assumption by exploring the interactions among diverse and often divided people, not-so-diverse banana plants, and persistent yet unpredictable pathogens that formed and reformed tropical landscapes and livelihoods in export banana zones. In other words, I try to put the agriculture back into banana plantation history in order to pay critical attention to both scientific ideas about tropical landscapes and the everyday cultivation practices that absorbed so much of working people’s time and energy. I am less interested in arguing for the primacy of cultural or biological processes than in demonstrating their historical entanglement. In order to do so, I borrow concepts from agroecology, an emerging field of research that studies interactions between cropping systems and their surrounding environments.
- In emphasizing the role of contingency, or the historicity of agroecological systems, I am not suggesting that people-plant interactions take place in an ‘‘anything goes’’ world without limits. The qualitative differences between a banana plantation and a lowland tropical forest cannot be denied; indeed, their disparate qualities are central to this book’s overarching argument. Nevertheless, attempts to draw well-defined borders between natural spaces and cultural places run the peril of ignoring all-important interactions between fields, forests, and waterways; and between cultivated, wild, and hybrid organisms.
- 7 – Economic historians have written extensively about the ‘‘boom and bust’’ cycles that characterized Latin American export production during the past 150 years, but they have devoted little attention to understanding how mass markets affected the agroecological resources upon which export economies have been based.10 I describe the formation and evolution of U.S. mass markets for bananas in both socioeconomic and cultural terms in order to shed light on both who could afford to eat bananas and why people chose to eat them in the first place. In other words, this book examines the transformation of a tropical plant into a food commodity.
- 9 – Scholars have also underestimated the persistence of non-company growers in Honduras during the years when the U.S. fruit companies began to integrate vertically. For writers who have portrayed the fruit companies as introducing advances in agriculture, medicine, education, and economic organization, small-scale cultivators and their low-input agricultural methods have often symbolized the non-modern ‘‘other’’ with which the virtues of the banana companies’ modernizing projects are contrasted. On the other hand, many Marxist critiques, endeavoring to fit the banana industry’s history into linear models of proletarianization, have focused on the emergence of a class-conscious proletariat disposed to organizing strikes, trade unions, and communist movements. Both of these approaches generally fail to account for the dynamic presence of small-scale cultivators whose initiative, persistence, and unpredictability undermine both liberal and Marxist visions of modernity.
- 12-13 – However, images of ‘‘banana men’’ cutting backroom deals with corrupt politicians obscure the fact that bananas grow in soil, not on paper; the concessions provided the banana companies with crucial advantages over potential competitors, but they did not make banana production a fait accompli. The biophysical resources needed to grow bananas were not infinitely malleable ‘‘raw materials,’’ but components of dynamic agroecosystems.
- 13 – This book calls attention to the continued importance of agriculture in a postmodern age. My intent is to restore dynamism to agriculture and to recover the livelihoods of worker/cultivators in export banana zones without romanticizing their often arduous and uncertain work, over-simplifying their lives, or inscribing political tendencies upon them.
- Finally, I seek to identify the human agents who collectively formed the mass market ‘‘structures’’ that played a central role in shaping production. These are not always easy tasks, yet they are important ones for historians (and others) seeking to interrupt discourses on development that equate progress with rising rates of consumption and technological innovation while displaying little concern for those who bear the brunt of the risks that accompany changing landscapes and livelihoods.
- 37 – One 1893 source noted that the ‘‘well organized’’ rail service between New Orleans and Chicago enabled bananas to sell frequently at lower prices in the Windy City than in New York.88 In a very real sense, then, the transformation of the banana from a novelty to commodity was a product of the fossil fuel era. But innovations in transportation technologies alone cannot explain the tremendous rise in U.S. banana imports.
- This pattern reflected both the seasonality of domestic U.S. fruits—banana consumption slacked when fresh peaches, melons, and apples were available—and the fact that many small fruit dealers who lacked insulated storage facilities stopped carrying bananas during the winter. However, the fact that bananas were harvested throughout the calendar year enabled them to become the first seasonless fresh fruit available for mass consumption in the United States.
- 51 – By 1930, the company and its subsidiaries had nearly 6,300 hectares of land under irrigation. Zemurray’s companies also constructed spillways and canals in order ‘‘to encourage flood overflows’’ into wetlands in order to build up layers of silt that over time would form arable soils.
- 54 – In addition to bananas, some native plants, including Heliconia, may have served as a host for F. oxysporum in forest environments.77 However, prior to the rise of the export banana trade, epidemics were rare because ‘‘plantations were small and scattered.’’78 The landscape mosaics of small farms and banana-free blocks of land inhibited the movement of the soil-borne pathogen, and consequently, infected populations remained isolated.79 Also, for cultivators who planted bananas primarily as a shade crop and/or for home consumption, a couple of wilting plants would not generate much concern because the farmers’ livelihoods were not tied to maximizing production of a single banana variety. But when thousands of people cleared forests and planted Gros Michel banana plants for export, the significance of plant and pathogen changed in reciprocal fashion.
- 57 – The initial failure to develop a commercial hybrid cannot be attributed entirely to the banana’s biology. In order to be a commercial success, hybrids had to possess both resistance to F. oxysporum and a strong resemblance to Gros Michel fruit—the variety around which U.S. mass markets had formed
- 217 – However, as this book has demonstrated, the fruit companies’ political and economic power conditioned, but did not determine, the historical trajectory of export banana production in Honduras and elsewhere. Export banana farms were simultaneously linked to international commodity chains and a web of agroecological relationships that constrained, resisted, and confounded the power of the fruit companies and their allies.
- Acknowledging the role of contingency, the particularity of place, and the entangled agency of people, plants, and pathogens does not preclude efforts to draw comparisons with other regions and commodities in order to formulate new explanatory models capable of informing policy debates and political projects. In this final chapter, I draw upon scholarship on other agricultural commodities in order to place export bananas in a comparative perspective.
- 218 – In the final section, I focus my comparison on both human and non-human elements of agroecosystems—soils, plants, pathogens, and herbivores—in order to account for both similarities and differences found within and among different commodity sectors. Integrating non-human actors runs the risk of filling history’s score card with an incomprehensible number of players. However, my intention is to compare the dynamic relationships among actors, not to expand the lineup of autonomous entities.
