Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas

Abstract

What could be more benign (predictably bland, digestible, uniform, and pest- and blemish-free) yet fraught with sinister undercurrents (military coups, massacres, corruption, and pesticide poisonings) than the ubiquitous banana? First World consumers may know one side of the cultural history of the banana—comical jingles and Carmen Miranda—but are usually blissfully unaware of how Pablo Neruda, Miguel Angel Asturias, or even Gabriel García Márquez used the fruit to evoke exploitation and death.In the past decade and a half, the banana industry has inspired an outpouring of new scholarship, almost all of it focusing on a single country or region. These studies have appropriately emphasized global aspects of the banana industry and include political, social, and cultural history. Yet not until Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg’s Banana Wars has a single volume invited readers to engage with the entire global system of banana production over the past century. In this collection, the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts: it also enriches each of the parts and suggests new ways of understanding each local history in a global context.This interdisciplinary anthology includes essays by historians, anthropologists, a sociologist, and a geographer. The first section, “A Global Fruit,” contains three essays that look at banana production, distribution, and consumption on a global scale. The second section, on Central and South America, includes essays on banana production in British Honduras, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as a riveting collection of historical documents rescued by Philippe Bourgois from a Chiriquí Land Company (a United Fruit subsidiary) warehouse on the Panama–Costa Rica border. The third section, on the Caribbean, contains essays on St. Lucia and St. Vincent.The richness of the collection lies in its diversity of approaches and themes, as well as its geographical scope and attention to global and comparative issues. In some ways, this diversity is also the collection’s weakness. Since each essay takes a virtually unique approach, it is sometimes difficult to draw connections and comparisons among them— the collection offers episodes, rather than comprehensiveness.Nevertheless, certain themes do emerge. First is the broad set of differences in patterns of production between Central and South America and the Caribbean. On the mainland, production was dominated by large U.S. companies, especially United Fruit. On the islands—at least on St. Lucia and St. Vincent—production was in the hands of small peasant farmers, who sold their crop to the British shipper and marketer Geest Industries. These differences in production are related to the second major theme: the two patterns of banana marketing in the world and how they have changed in recent decades. In the so-called ACP (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific) banana-producing areas, European countries give their former colonies preferential quotas on banana imports. In the “dollar banana” areas (Central and South America), the so-called free market has reigned. (I qualify the term free market because of the economic monopoly and political intervention exercised by UF and other U.S.-based companies over the years.) Since the 1990s, the “dollar” producers have pressured Europe to reduce or eliminate preferential treatment for the Caribbean, setting off what came to be known as the Banana Wars.A third theme—less clearly articulated than the first two, yet nevertheless implicit in many of the essays—is the political economy of export production. Peasant producers and wageworkers in the banana industry are among the most powerless actors in the process, yet they have developed and pursued their own agendas in the arenas offered to them. National governments in both producing and importing countries and companies such United Fruit, Standard Fruit, Dole, and Geest wielded far greater power but still were subject to conflict with each other, global economic forces like the Depression, and environmental challenges such as disease. The complex struggles and negotiations among these different actors inform this third theme.Within this thematic unity, however, many disjunctures and questions emerge. For example, Laura Raynolds suggests that small peasant production may hold the best hope for the future of the banana industry, while Lawrence Grossman argues that it is doomed. Dario Euraque looks at migrant banana workers and blackness in Honduran national ideology, Karla Slocum at St. Lucian peasants’ analysis of their crisis, and Cindy Forster at labor mobilization in the context of national reform and revolution in Guate-mala—yet there is little basis for readers to draw connections among these issues, except for the fact that they all relate in some ways to bananas.Nevertheless, this collection offers a fascinating and valuable panorama of the history of and current challenges facing the different actors involved in the production of bananas. It makes a welcome addition to the growing interdisciplinary area of commodity-system studies.