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.
©independent.co.uk
The regulation of corporations is not the menace. Corporations are the menace.
jj
Is it finally time to start breaking up the corporations?
All of them?
I think it is well past that day for reality to take a major, fatal, bloody bite out of these legal fabrications.
If corporate charters were not based on profit, and were designed for the production of goods and services with considerations for all the elements that reaaly effect the well being of the people those goods and services were intended for, what would the world be like?
If every one could make a comfortable living without the need to dominate or have more than someone else, what would that be called?
If corporate charters were based on anything but profit, they wouldn’t exist. It’s long past the time when the major corporations - at the very least - need to have their charters pulled.
sign hey for the bananna
most phallic of the fruits
a yellow tropic dagger
for the hearts of those that loots!
I believe cultivated bananas are essentially clones, and as such can be devastated by disease (if one gets sick, they all get sick) - as happened with potatoes in the Irish Famine of the 1840s.
Tight Regulation is apparently the only way to get any kind of moral actions from the multinational corporation. Reagan started the deregulation that has hurt the citizens of our country in every sector affected. I think Rule of Law is a requirment for a viable society, it helps keep the sociopaths in check, the rest of us act as compassionate human beings as part of our core being.
Google “united fruit george bush”
We have Cheney, the manipulator, and we have the puppet, George Bush. What a combination! Can’t you see the manipulator standing over the puppet, telling the puppet what a terrific guy he is and how the puppet should start the propaganda to invade Iran. What the hell, if he did it with bananas, elections, oil profits, media control, attacks on working-man’s support, the Constitution of the U.S., after all isn’t that why Cheney chose himself as Vice’President?
For all the praying people in these U.S., start paaying we do not get another Republican administration.
Tragically ironic. When a banana “type” dies, you go into the jungle and pluck another one. But all the chemicals and diseased footprints in the world just can’t seem to wipe out a corporation, which instead just mutates, regulated or not.
The real moral to this tale is if it’s creamy, sweet, not too messy, good for babies, fits conveniently into lunch boxes and diaper bags, i.e. too good to be true, it is. Stop buying bananas. Babies love American-grown apples and pears.
M
Life would get better, people smarter and more creative, and diversity would thrive without corporations. They were created to accomplish things like building a bridge that individuals would not be able to do one at a time. They were given specific charters for specific tasks and if public money was used they were accountable. The current level of corporatism was not an intended consequence or public good.
To declare war on the corporations, society will be plunged into a class warfare of the type Marx had predicted. Instead what is needed is to implement tight rules and regulations with the proper army of public servants (like the ones Bush has jettisoned since his ascendency to power)to enforce them.
To begin with, corporations should not be given corporate welfare. Second of all it should be illegal for corporations to lobby, contribute and finance public officials. Finally corporations should be taxed to the point that our middle class benefits (rather than suffers!) from their existence.
The problem is that the corporate media and their corporate sponsors will never allow this too occur as they continue to misinform the populace about where our problems really stem from.
“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power”
Benito Mussolini
Check out Retired Marine general Smedley Butler’s take on this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=e8IwAAAACAAJ&dq=Smedley+Darlington+Butler&hl=en&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fsourceid%3Dnavclient%26ie%3DUTF-8%26rls%3DGGLD,GGLD:2005-20,GGLD:en%26q%3Dsmedley%2Bbutler&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1&cad=author-navigational
Thank you, secretarybird for reminding us of the Irish (and other famines caused by imperialism.
Remember a few years ago when a hurrricane blew through Central America, destroying many banana plantations. The reasponse from the corporations about replanting, “There’s a worldwide glut of bananas. We aren’t replanting.”
There’s a word for it-pillage.
I wonder why people reject anarchism (every person for themselves) as a model for government but embrace it as a model for business? The theory that a free market would automatically monitor and stableize itself is, like the theory of ether, something that just hasn’t proved out over time. What will work I have no better idea than anyone else, but I would start with the premise that we all share both the resources and responsibility of our planet and work from there. We have a big problem right now because those people with the most resources have the least sense of responsibility. That is a disaster.
The really scary part is this:
Monsanto and the few other “inventors” of transgenic mutant organisms (usually falsely referred to as genetically modified foods) have been allowed to monoculture over 80% of our corn, soy, wheat, rapeseed (canola) and cotton, with rice coming on strong.
Since none of their TMOs have ever existed on Earth before, they have not had to the chance to evolve a protective immune system. Sooner or later, a fungus or disease will show up and “go bananas” so to speak - and then we’ll have no corn, wheat, soy, rapeseed, rice or cotton.
And that’s not an “if” scenario, BTW, it’s a “when…”
My wife has a cockatoo parrot that likes bananas, usually about a half of one per day. He is about 6 years old with an expected lifespan of 50-60 years.
So I explained to him today that bananas may die out sooner, and he may have to adapt to a dietary change someday. I think he understood me about as well as most humans understand the effects of unfettered corporations. A flutter, then a squawk, then a blank stare.
after maplefudge
hey for the bananna -
a really phallic fruit,
a yellow tropic dagger
in the hearts of those who loot
after maplefudge - 2
hey for the bananna -
a really phallic fruit,
but a yellow tropic dagger
in the hearts of those who loot
I simply want to reduce each and every corporation to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in my bathtub.
Yes.We have no bananas.
and people wonder why leaders like Castro and Chavez are hostile to the US.
Corporations and competitive capitalism are not evil. Corporations, while owned by citizens, are driven by profit, and they hate competition. Thats the nature of the beast. A beast that is well controlled, can do useful work for the nation. Government is needed to ensure the beast eats well enough to be strong (profitable), but controlled (regulated). so that it works for the general welfare of the people (working class and consumers). Its a win win situation when it does it’s job properly. Corporations and workers both profit. But unleash the beast, and he devours everything in it’s path, and the citizens end up serving the beast.
Unfortunately, your governments leaders have chosen to accept corporations bananas in exchange for helping establish corporatism (fascism), and ignore it’s constitutional mandate to look after the general welfare of all it’s citizens. The beast is off it’s leash. Government now serves it’s corporate citizens, the beast. So our markets are no longer competitive, but are instead monopolies or cartels, and crony capitalism has replaced competitive capitalism. The beast is king.
In the march toward globalization, the largest corporations control global markets as WTO forces small nations to open it’s markets under Free Trade mandates. These nations smaller domestic corporations then must compete with the global giants. They get eaten up like bananas, and the global giants get bigger. Globalization has become global fascism, as the global corporate giants can control each nations politics, as they have in the US.
The beast has gone global, and is gorging on the bananas.
Globalization and WTO must be scrapped. Only when each nation is strong and independent can globalization be implemented in the form of a democratic global republic. We are light years from this. Globalization in the current state can only end up in an undemocratic Global fascism, where every citizens will get the mark of the beast, and serve the beast.
To reverse this, the US government must be made to reverse course, since they are driving the global fascism, following the directions from the elite in London and at home. Otherwise, when the beast runs out of bananas, it will be hungry, and when the beast gets hungry enough, it will eat you. It’s already doing so in case you have not noticed. Just nibbling so far. Getting ready to take a big bite though. Then reality will hit. By then it might be too late. Hard to fight after the beast has bitten your leg off.
overkill suggests we “Google ‘united fruit george bush’
I knew from reading “An American Dynasty” by Kevin Phillips that the Bush family owned United Fruit, but here is a quote from the first article that comes up when you Google Google “united fruit george bush”
“In 1953, Bush got money from Brown Brothers Harriman and, with partners Hugh and Bill Liedtke, formed Zapata Petroleum. By the late 1950s they were millionaires. Bush bought subsidiary Zapata Off-Shore from his partners and went into business on his own in 1954. By 1958, the new company was drilling on the Cay Sal Bank in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. These islands had been leased to Nixon supporter and CIA contractor Howard Hughes the previous year and were later used as a base for CIA raids on Cuba. The CIA was using companies like Zapata to stage and supply secret missions attacking Fidel Castro’s Cuban government in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA’s codename for that invasion was ‘Operation Zapata.’ In 1981, all Securities and Exchange Commission filings for Zapata Off-Shore between 1960 and 1966 were destroyed. In other words, the year Bush became vice president, important records detailing his years at his drilling company disappeared. In 1969, Zapata bought the United Fruit Company of Boston, another company with strong CIA connections.”
Is the pineapple next?
Maybe we’ll have banana flavored soilent yellow?
after ekselsiyor
Sing hey for the bananna -
a really phallic fruit,
but a yellow tropic dagger
in the hearts of those who loot
them that hurt a lot of feelings
them that made a lot of bones
may they slip upon the peelings
of their dwindling hoard of clones
E tu, Chiquita Banana?
Every child knows the story: its the goose that laid the golden egg. Over and over and over.
great poetry here and some mighty fine Butterfield prose too
Yes, the pineapple is next. Two years ago Dole planted its last pinealpple crop in Hawaii. The were outsourcing to Vietman because the plantation land in Hawaii was too valuable for development in the land scarce islands. The plantations will be turned into condos for the wealthy and the workers will be without jobs or affordable housing. That sucks!
Bananas and almost all fruits that we eat today is a product of some kind of tinkering and breeding over the years.
Some countries like Australia do not allow imported bananas and rely on the local ones.
And so far that seems to work for them to keep the fungus at bay.
Pineapples and most bananas are seedless and the last few summers there have been a lot of tasteless seedless watermelons in the market.
Whats next seedless peaches?
You ever seen the pineapples in Thailand ~GKL~? They taste like a pinapple should taste, like the ones we got here 50 years ago and they are huge and juicy and they’re two feet long.
In 1970, I lived mostly on fresh fruit, vegetables, peanut butter and bannana sandwiches and fried rice for a year. The banannas were smaller than the ones we buy here, but were they ever good. One could live on ten bucks a month for food and it was healthy food. ___ Wonder what it’s like there now?
Banana’s are a herb not a fruit and yes, Australia is fighting hard to stop diseased imports but the ‘free trade’ fanatics are starting to win and they will destroy Australia.
Got to say I don’t mind that the Gros Michel or the Cavendish are things of the past, at least as they were produced for the provincial ‘Murrican consumer. Mom made me eat them now and again ’cause the were good for me, potassium or sumpin. Had to gag those suckers down. And how could any one despoil peanut butter, the food of the gods, by slapping them yellow things on it? Got to say I did kinda like the canned pineapple, but that’s because it was all sugar syrup.
Then I started hanging around SE Asia. Over 100 kinds of bananas and over 50 pineapples according to the locals, and I aim to try each and every one of them. Finally got to taste what local, small grown ones were like. Folks grow them in their backyards, in unused land along the roads, in bits and pieces of still alive soil here and there among the land agro-bidness has poisoned to death. A couple of acres is a gargantuan growing operation ’round here. You get these most delicious fruits (or herb) at local markets, local restaurants, local prepared fruit stalls. Problem, for the corporations and their branders, is that they come in seasons and as the folks who grow them have time and energy. Not only that, a good bit of the rain forest has been cut down already for rubber and oil palm mega-plantations, so poor UF would have a very tough time Hawaii-ing these countries.
In the US, I eat apples, pears, peaches, grapes; in SE Asia, I eat bananas, pineapples, mangos, papaya, mangosteens, dragon fruit, rambutans, star fruit, and on and on. Think globally, eat locally. To everything, including fruit (and herbs) there is a season.
Thank you for reminding me of the seasons, jpoverseas. I need to turn off this computer and get out in my garden. I have vegetables, fruits and herbs to plant. If global warming doesn’t do in my crops, I can stay away from the bananas this winter.
” I have grown up in a culture without any idea of physical limits to what we can buy and eat”
I was struck by the same thing when watching the finale of “The Matrix”. The movie had no idea there were any limits to how much metal and rare earths you could dig up and make into robots, or energy to power them.
The fruit and vegetables in CUBA have the best taste I have ever had. The green pepers make the green wax thing we buy taste just like that a green wax thing. Oranges I would put against any US grown. Organic non chemical food is the only answer to the big US spray the crap out of it and put it on a truck or rat filled ship a week before it hits the stores.
This summer do the test yourself. Plant even if you live in an apt. some veggies. A flower pot works just fine. Then just before you are about to pick the stuff go to the store and buy the same product. Then do the test. KEEP THE SEEDS OUT OF YOUR HOME GROWN FOOD. You will find and looking for ways to grow even more of the stuff even in the off season.
This all reminds me of one of my favorite movies.
and I paraphrase…
“the strawberries taste like strawberries, and the schnozberries taste like schnozberries”
~JPOVERSEAS~ Despoil peanut butter? The only way to despoil it is to remove the oil and add chemicals, like Jif, Skippy and the other spoiled junk. I only consume natural peanut butter and I don’t despoil it with banannas, it enhances the tatse of the fruit. That was Elvis’s favorite BTW. It don’t do well with tomatoes though. I spread peanut butter on deep fried SanFran hotdogs with mayo and relish. Yum Yum.
hopefully very soon we will use bananas for ethanol, the dried mash for hi protein feed for fish
and you gringos pay 5.00 lb for bananas if you can even get any
we will have the last laughs on fat arrogant,greedy gringos
lol X 1 million times
IMPEACH and hang in public all traitors and all greedy corporate fucks
“Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power”
Benito Mussolini
Fascism is actually the religious worship of death, cruelty and hatred. All of that is rapidly overtaking the United States. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is in large part a religious Crusade against Islam, a campaign to kill “ragheads”. This has barely been mentioned even by progressive news outlets. Just as the nazis killed Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, the weak and deformed and other “untermenschen”, the United States in now in the business of wiping out “ragheads” because their deaths, in the eyes of those who murder them, is the will of God Almighty. That’s Fascism.
Some great posts here and no trolls to make my blood boil, thanks everyone!
KEM PATRICK
Yes the pineapples are good bought three huge nam peung or honey pineapples right from some of the local markets you are talking about.
There are still those fat bananas around with seeds in them a lot of good food here.I have been living on mainly tropical fruits for years.
I am delighted to hear that ~CHERMOYA~. I was stationed at UBON, and NKP and quartered in a hotel in town and lived in Bancock for eleven weeks on two seperate occasions. Then several three month tours at Utapoa, lived right on the beach there. The food was great and if you wanted it spicy hot, it was HOT! Loved the people there and the fishing and scuba diving in the Gulf was fantastic. Glad to hear the fruit is still wonderful. Loved the fruit with the barbs, like a huge grape with one large reddish seed.
More corporate environmental destruction.
From the Smithsonian National Zoological Park Migratory Bird Center:
What Is Shade-Grown Coffee?
In the time that it takes you to drink your next cup of coffee, acres of tropical forest will be lost. Along with the forest will go the birds and other wildlife that depend on it. Wouldn’t it be gratifying to know that by choosing the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) “Bird Friendly®” seal of approval you’d be helping to conserve wildlife habitat?
“Shade-grown” refers to the way coffee has been traditionally farmed. For generations, coffee shrubs have been planted in the shade of tall trees, making these traditional coffee plantations excellent homes for birds and other forest-dwelling wildlife.
Over the past 30 years, more than half of the traditional shade-grown coffee farms in Latin America have been converted to “sun-coffee” farms to increase production. This newer method entails clearing or thinning the shade trees and growing coffee plants under full or nearly full sun conditions. These changes also demand the use of agrochemicals like synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to counter the effects of eliminating the shaded agroforestry system.
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ConservationAndScience/MigratoryBirds/Coffee/about.cfm
Other types of bananas have been in local (SoCal) supermarkets for quite a while. I love the little ones they grow in the Philippines. My wife likes the ones they call Mule bananas, but she thinks they need to be cooked so they are so loaded with oil and sugar I don’t eat them.
This is the thinnest article I have read on this site. There is no comprehension whatever of bananas, no mention
of “bunchy top” disease, which is a far greater challenge today than “panama wilt”. This article would deserve a
C- grade if it were a paper written by a 6th grade student. What is it doing on this site? “Have you no decency”?
Yes, cazador22. We have no decency.