Bananas Are Dying—Killed By Corporate Monoculture

by Heidi Stevenson

Prepare to say goodbye to bananas. Do you remember back in the sixties when there was a change in bananas? It wasn’t announced, but those of us who love the fruit recall it. They became less sweet and creamy -- just not as good. There was no information about it. The change seemed to slip under the radar and most of us forgot about it.

That change foretold what’s now coming—the near-complete death of bananas. They're dying, and their death is a precursor of what’s to come if we continue to accept corporate farming. But first, back to the impending loss of bananas.

We tend to think of bananas as a single species with no more than one or two variations on the theme—something like oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruits that are all variations of a single species. That, though, is far from the truth. Until the mid-eighteen hundreds, most bananas grew wild and local people ate them, though some local cultivation existed. There was a huge variety. Some were sweet and some sour. Some were creamy, while others had a bit of crunch. Some were yellow, but others were red or purple. Today, most of that variety is lost.

Chiquita’s History

During the 1870’s, Minor Keith was a young man from a wealthy railroad company who went to Costa Rica to help build a national railroad. He and other relatives accomplished the task at the cost of 5,000 workers’ lives. He also started planting bananas, a crop that was gaining popularity in the US, on the easements along the railway. The Costa Rican government could not make payments on its railroad loans from British banks. Because of his wealth and connections, Keith was able to raise the money to finish the job, largely by negotiating a significant decrease in the interest rate, from 7% down to 2.5%. This put him in the debt of the dictator, whose daughter he'd married, so he was granted 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railroad, where he’d been planting bananas, along with a 99-year lease on the railroad’s operation along that route.

Yes, it’s just amazing what can be accomplished through birth into wealth combined with an utterly unscrupulous nature. The corporation that came out of this was United Fruit, now known as Chiquita. It had an insatiable appetite for profits, which it was willing to satisfy at virtually any cost to the people, the countries it occupied, and nature. Their typical modus operandi was, from the very beginning, to force their way into a poor nation, slash and burn to create banana plantations, and provide slave wages to the natives. Virtually any means was used to lop off anything that got in the way of profits.

It was this—the behavior of Chiquita—that led to the term Banana Republic, coined by the novelist and short story writer, O. Henry. It was not a term of derision for the countries, but a term of sympathy for their enslavement by United Fruit. In the February 2008 issue of The Nation, the author states that United Fruit "was truly a terrorizing company—a kind of Halliburton, McDonald's, Nike, and Archer Daniels Midland all rolled into one. United Fruit set the precedent for the propaganda, exploitation and imperialism of modern-day corporate plunderers."

Panama Disease

Then in 1903, what should have brought these practices to a screaching halt, worsened the tale. A fungus named Fusarium oxysporum, commonly known as Panama disease or Agent Green and sometimes called Sigatoka, started to attack the monoculture crop, the Gros Michael variety. Since these crops were not grown from seed, but instead were all clones, the result of planting only from rhizomes (underground stems), none of the plants stood a chance once one had been infected.

Of course, United Fruit did what any giant of monoculture would do. They dumped tons of chemicals on the crops. It didn’t work. The plants continued to die. Though advised that the only real solution was to plant a wide range of banana varieties, United Fruit’s only real concern was the short term bottom line. Their first solution was to find more impoverished nations with the right climate and repeat what they’d done to Costa Rica, and by that time, many other nations.

Sigatoka Disease

The company’s own adherence to short term profit, even over its own long term survival, resulted in refusal to engage in even the most basic techniques to avoid carrying the infection to previously-unaffected locations. The chemicals slowed the progression on Panama disease, but didn’t stop it. Then, in 1935, Sigatoka, an even more virulent fungus, showed up. This was the death-knell of the Gros Michael banana.

By 1960, the Gros Michael banana was extinct. United Fruit, though, was lucky. They found another variety, the Cavendish, that was resistant to the fungus infections. Note, though, the word resistant. They were not immune.

Naturally, Cavendish bananas replaced Gros Michaels. United Fruit -- by then known as Chiquita -- didn’t learn any good lessons. They continued the same practices of monoculture clone planting, massive chemical use, and moving to new countries as the bananas in old ones died.

Examples of United Fruit-Chiquita Methods of Operation

Colombian Strike Against United Fruit

In 1928, thousands of United Fruit workers were on strike, demanding a six-day work week, an eight-hour day, medical care, and payment in real money, rather than company scrip that could only be spent at the company store. They demonstrated peacefully in a town square. After a five-minute warning, the United Fruit-controlled Colombian government’s military opened up with machine guns, killing an unknown number. United Fruit itself estimates at least 1,000 were killed, but the real extent of the massacre will never be known, since most of the bodies were probably dumped in the sea and buried deep in the forest. In other words, the incident was covered up.

Bribes

After the president, Eli Black, commited suicide in 1975, the corporation, now called United Brands after a flurry of corporate buyouts and mergers, was subjected to an investigation, which resulted in a tale of bribery. The puppet president of Honduras had been given $1.25 million and promised another equivalent amount in exchange for reduction of export taxes. Then, it was discovered that European officials had received $750,000 in bribes.

In 1978, United Brands admitted that it had given $2.5 million to Honduras’s economy minister. For that, they were fined $15,000.

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