Why Bananas are a Parable For Our Times

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon - in five, 10 or 30 years - the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are leading us.

Bananas seem at first like a lush product of nature, but this is a sweet illusion. In their current form, bananas were quite consciously created. Until 150 ago, a vast array of bananas grew in the world's jungles and they were invariably consumed nearby. Some were sweet; some were sour. They were green or purple or yellow.

A corporation called United Fruit took one particular type - the Gros Michael - out of the jungle and decided to mass produce it on vast plantations, shipping it on refrigerated boats across the globe. The banana was standardised into one friendly model: yellow and creamy and handy for your lunchbox.

There was an entrepreneurial spark of genius there - but United Fruit developed a cruel business model to deliver it. As the writer Dan Koeppel explains in his brilliant history Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, it worked like this. Find a poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it won't, topple it and replace it with one that will.

Burn down its rainforests and build banana plantations. Make the locals dependent on you. Crush any flicker of trade unionism. Then, alas, you may have to watch as the banana fields die from the strange disease that stalks bananas across the globe. If this happens, dump tonnes of chemicals on them to see if it makes a difference. If that doesn't work, move on to the next country. Begin again.

This sounds like hyperbole until you study what actually happened. In 1911, the banana magnate Samuel Zemurray decided to seize the country of Honduras as a private plantation. He gathered together some international gangsters like Guy "Machine Gun" Maloney, drummed up a private army, and invaded, installing an amigo as president.

The term "banana republic" was invented to describe the servile dictatorships that were created to please the banana companies. In the early 1950s, the Guatemalan people elected a science teacher named Jacobo Arbenz, because he promised to redistribute some of the banana companies' land among the millions of landless peasants.

President Eisenhower and the CIA (headed by a former United Fruit employee) issued instructions that these "communists" should be killed, and noted that good methods were "a hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker or kitchen knife". The tyranny they replaced it with went on to kill more than 200,000 people.

But how does this relate to the disease now scything through the world's bananas? The evidence suggests even when they peddle something as innocuous as bananas, corporations are structured to do one thing only: maximise their shareholders' profits. As part of a highly regulated mixed economy, that's a good thing, because it helps to generate wealth or churn out ideas. But if the corporations aren't subject to tight regulations, they will do anything to maximise short-term profit. This will lead them to seemingly unhinged behaviour - like destroying the environment on which they depend.

Not long after Panama Disease first began to kill bananas in the early 20th century, United Fruit's scientists warned the corporation was making two errors. They were building a gigantic monoculture. If every banana is from one homogenous species, a disease entering the chain anywhere on earth will soon spread. The solution? Diversify into a broad range of banana types.

The company's quarantine standards were also dire. Even the people who were supposed to prevent infection were trudging into healthy fields with disease-carrying soil on their boots. But both of these solutions cost money - and United Front didn't want to pay. They decided to maximise their profit today, reckoning they would get out of the banana business if it all went wrong.

So by the 1960s, the Gros Michel that United Fruit had packaged as The One True Banana was dead. They scrambled to find a replacement that was immune to the fungus, and eventually stumbled upon the Cavendish. It was smaller and less creamy and bruised easily, but it would have to do.

But like in a horror movie sequel, the killer came back. In the 1980s, the Cavendish too became sick. Now it too is dying, its immunity a myth. In many parts of Africa, the crop is down 60 percent. There is a consensus among scientists that the fungus will eventually infect all Cavendish bananas everywhere. There are bananas we could adopt as Banana 3.0 - but they are so different to the bananas that we know now that they feel like a totally different and far less appetising fruit. The most likely contender is the Goldfinger, which is crunchier and tangier: it is know as "the acid banana."

Thanks to bad corporate behaviour and physical limits, we seem to be at a dead end. The only possible glimmer of hope is a genetically modified banana that can resist Panama Disease. But that is a distant prospect, and it is resisted by many people: would you like a banana split made from a banana split with fish genes?

When we hit up against a natural limit like Panama disease, we are bemused, and then affronted. It seems instinctively bizarre to me that lush yellow bananas could vanish from the global food supply, because I have grown up in a culture without any idea of physical limits to what we can buy and eat.

Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea - and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself.

But have we learned? Across the world, politicians like George Bush and David Cameron are telling us the regulation of corporations is "a menace" to be "rolled back"; they even say we should leave the planet's climate in their hands. Now that's bananas.

Johann Hari is a wrier for the London Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

To learn more about the banana crisis, read the terrific book 'Banana: the Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.'

Comments

[timkeating]

Excellent article. However, some good news in all this is that indigenous people and small-scale farmers have either never stopped growing bananas organically and under the shade (bananas are originally and understory plant just like coffee and cacao — both also hybridized by American scientists to grow in the full-sun with lots of chemicals).

Rainforest Relief is working with farmer cooperatives in Costa Rica who are growing older varieties with mandated shade, without chemicals, leaving old growth trees alone and usually leaving the majority of their lands as forest. They need our support.

Eating bananas in the US or EU, like other tropical fruits consumed fresh, necessitates transitions to monoculture and industrialized production — and the abuses of the land and the workers that come with it. Those 'perfect' fruits have to make it to our supermarkets in under 14 days.

We are supporting the conversion of bananas into durables (dried, pureed or fermented into vinegar), much like coffee or cacao, so even the smallest grower can participate in sustainable trade.

It's unrealistic in a sustainable world to think that everyone, wherever they are on the globe, can eat fresh produce grown 10,000 miles away.

With simple vacuum drying techniques or pureeing or fermenting, we can get access to some of these wondrous products and still support sustainable production (at least until the oil to ship them runs out!).

See http://www.rainforestrelief.org/Campaigns/ForestBananas_.html.

tim keating, director

[paixa3]

How close is the USA to a banana republic? Very close indeed. Shame too.

[Ellenoday]

And we have the ideal man to lead the United Banana Republic are uncanny.

Aside from the obvious observations of name, color and so on just look how well his experience matches with those who run smaller Banana Republics. Zilch, Nada, Niks

[hmargret]

Great article!
Now that the banana will be history, how about making sure that the Obama administration reins in corporations like MONSANTO, (supporters of Hillary ) which are doing their best to control or destroy corn, soybeans and anything else they can.
Science doesn't get to play the trump card, nature does.

[SiberianRat]

Excellent article--very nice metaphor to make your point. First off, I had no idea bananas are so threatened, and I'm so depressed now (I eat one nearly every day). I have seen this in the economy for a long time (and I'm not an economist)--one just has to have some reasoning skills and read a bit. I personally am glad about what's happening now, because it's going to force us to make changes that are long overdue.

[BusinessMatters]

I like this article a great deal. I believe it would have even greater impact if you added the current name for United Fruit is Chiquita. We have a tendency in our society to create brand identities that let corporations with lowered public scrutiny.

[PaceSetter]

Bananas are proof that god exists.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4472004596147265716

[EconMan]

And as Einstein said: "God doesn't play dice with the Universe, and he also doesn't bet against the house."

[Happyexpat]

What a great article! As a teenager I spent two summers in Guatemala. Part of the first summer was spent in a place called Tiquisate--right next door to the United Fruit compound. I went there one day with my Guatemalan friend. It was evident to me at the age of 15 that the place wasn't about fruit. There was something so evil there you could almost touch it. Turns out it was the CIA, a corporation if ever there was one.

[HARVIN]

Democrat's spines are made of bananas.

[adammmm]

"Find a poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it won't, topple it and replace it with one that will." I think this pushes your anti-regulation argument clearly into straw man territory.

[Ellenoday]

Oh please, your sophomore concept of things is really boring to read.

[Ontrackmac]

Sad but true...Damn...I'm totally "Bummed" now...I want my nanas.

[berrycooda]

God made it possible for us to have food.

Maybe people will stop and think to give thanks for the food we have.

As you can see with the bananas, we may not have them some day and this could
happen to a lot of other food as well.

So eat hearty.....we may not always be this fortunate.

[ObjectiveRealist]

One needn't accept evolution to recognize "hybrid vigor" which is evident, in comparison to "purebred" (which is to say, inbred) members of many species. Even organisms as simplistic as bacteria colonies, bred for specialization, become more susceptible to changes in environment as they grow more specialized for particular environments, such as oil slicks. Whether you take your morality from secular philosophy or mythical texts, the lesson from the science is that complex ecosystems get disrupted by drastic changes, to even one component therein.

[mswzebo]

For an article about selective breeding and monoculture to convert jungle/destroy native habitats into plantations to produce food, you conclude ' God gave us food...eat hearty'? That's weird, dude.

[Lilybart]

So your reaction is to just give up? Let the corporations kill the banana and then whatever else they want? You will just say, well, it was a nice fruit while we had it. Guess we should eat some now then.

So is God going to make us some new bananas?

[snowryder]

The homogenous commercial banana has always been selected and marketed to those with homogenous tastes. I rarely eat the typical grocery store banana. They are tasteless, gross texturally, and stink before even getting too ripe. This last feature assures your bananas will be unappealing before using and you will buy more which will in turn also reach the bin before mouth.

I eat the many varieties bananas available at a typical latino fruteria. Little burros, fat reds, finger bananas. They are all delicious, smaller to fit a bananas natural fill-the-stomach tendency(when have you actually finished a 10" fat yellow commercial specimen). These non-commercial varieties last much longer, taste fine when ripened black, dry beautifully, etc. The reds have a wonderful berry-like flavor. Americans have been indoctrinated to be hostile to refined taste. The advertising continually celebrates the simpleton view and idiocratic reflex. Our corporations market to this lowbrow version of human. This story exemplifies the deep troubles built into our food products and the hyper-corporate model.

[publicmenace]

I thought I has seen every kind of elitist there was but now a banana elitist? Man, oh man. If I wanted a crunchy, tangy fruit, I would eat an apple. I like the smell , taste and texture of Cavendish bananas just fine. Anything else is less than perfect.

S c r e w plantains.

[yesyesyes]

The Lorax hates the US.

[xansam]

naw, the Lorax hates humanity (deservedly so)

[MaryAdams]

In the West we often look at the failure of the Soviet model of centralized economic control as a vindication of our own "free market" economy. But the answer is not so simple. The parable of the banana is a great example of the top-down, command and control model in our own economy. The good news is that the technologies of the knowledge era make it possible to have more diverse networks and organizations--that could manage more more sustainable, more diverse production. See my post with some thoughts on this at http://www.i-capitaladvisors.com/2009/01/10/of-bananas-and-industrialization/.

[whatsthatsound]

Brilliant,succinct article. Thank you!