First published in 2005, John Soluri's Banana Cultures joined an enormous scholarly literature examining the role of US fruit companies in Latin America. Most of this work delved into the locally distinctive but invariably arduous relations among workers, growers and the representatives of foreign capital that mobilised their labour and products. Foremost among these was the United Fruit Company (UFCO, later named Chiquita) that became, during its heyday between the 1920s and 1960s, the largest single landowner in Central America. The earliest journalistic and literary treatments of UFCO and its chief rival, Standard Fruit, cast the companies as omnipotent villains whose insatiable appetite for land and labour were abetted by US-engineered coups and other blunt weapons of imperialism. Much of the scholarship that emerged during the 1990s and early 2000s brought welcome nuance to this picture. It revealed the ways that workers and independent growers, some holding just a few acres under production, cultivated local allies in their clashes with the US companies or exercised both ‘everyday’ and collective resistance. Some examined banana sectors outside US corporate control, such as the Eastern Caribbean, where small growers secured a measure of dignity behind steep tariff and quota protection, now ended following a disastrous World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling.
The pace of this scholarship has lessened somewhat since Banana Cultures first appeared, perhaps reflecting the waning power of the banana companies themselves. Emblematic of this was Chiquita's acquisition by Brazilian investors in 2015 and the diversification of all of the companies into a wider range of agricultural products. Soluri's volume remains distinctive for its sweeping consideration of the social, ecological and symbolic contexts of banana production and consumption. His analysis centres on the north coast of Honduras, which became one of the first regions incorporated into the banana trade by the 1880s. The challenges of large-scale monoculture in the humid tropics are a familiar trope in industry literature, ranging from early twentieth-century triumphalist accounts of ‘taming’ the jungle to valuable recent investigative reporting on the health risks of chemical exposure. Most of the social science literature, however, accords more cursory attention to the agro-ecology of banana production. Soluri masterfully interweaves these social and ecological dimensions, showing that corporate responses to plant pathogens ‘appeared more like a series of improvisations […] than a well-scripted power play’ (p. 217).
The appearance of new pathogens created some new employment opportunities but foreclosed many more avenues among workers and independent growers. As in the entire Caribbean coast of Central America, production initially centred on small growers (poquiteros) who furnished UFCO railways and steamers with fruit for export. Exceptionally hardy and demanding few inputs, ‘the banana's biology […] made possible […] a comparatively quick and steady return on both capital and labor investments’ (p. 21) for even the smallest cultivator. Well into the 1930s, small growers won some concessions by allying with nationalist politicians against the companies. Only after UFCO acquired enormous tracts of land as railroad concessions did industrial-scale production expand under company auspices. The clearing of vast forests and replanting in genetically identical stands of Gros Michel bananas unleashed rapidly mutating plant diseases that necessitated ever more complex strategies of control. Poquiteros first saw their markets severely limited by outbreaks of soil-borne Panama disease, which led the companies to abandon and re-route the rail lines on which they depended. The appearance of leaf spot disease during the 1930s (the implications of which comprise an entire chapter) doomed the remaining small producers, who were unable to afford the Bordeaux spraying regimen required to control it. Chemical use rapidly accelerated after the Second World War, creating health and environmental risks that remain little studied to this day. Yet, paradoxically, the same workers (veneneros) who applied poisons at ground level protested the later introduction of aerial spraying not for health reasons but because it would leave many of them unemployed. For all their readiness to embrace and reformulate toxic chemicals to combat disease, the companies were remarkably resistant to the less disease-prone Cavendish variety, fearing that it would be rejected by consumers. When they finally made the shift around 1960, the advent of banana boxing induced a flood of new, overwhelmingly female workers into packing sheds, creating a workforce deeply segmented along the lines of earnings, ethnicity and gender. In tandem, it also prompted the adoption of additional chemicals required of the new production system.
Soluri's account ranges from sites of production in Honduras to the company's creation of a mass consumer market in the United States, which prefigured the role of advertising for other agricultural products. Once an exotic rarity little known outside of elite circles, by the early twentieth century the banana became the first fresh fruit available year-round, at a price far lower than apples, grapes or other seasonal alternatives. UFCO's ‘Miss Chiquita’ campaign of the post-war years primed consumers to regard company fruit with its familiar oval blue label as superior in quality. Aesthetics played a leading role in its branding campaign; indeed, the company doggedly stuck to Gros Michel because its thick peel enabled it to arrive in retail markets relatively unblemished compared to other varieties judged more flavourful. In a fascinating excursion into advertising symbolism, Soluri shows that Miss Chiquita inspired other campaigns (such as coffee's Juan Valdez) that ‘romanticiz[ed] daily life in places of production’ (p. 218) by effacing the oppression and hazards of banana plantations with the image of contented workers.
For this revised edition, Soluri retains the original text of his 2005 volume but appends a new preface and an extended epilogue (‘Beyond Banana Cultures’) that outlines Honduras’ recent turbulent history. Structural adjustment policies have contributed to the rise of maquiladores and palm-oil plantations that now claim primary place among the country's exports. A 2009 right-wing coup wedded Honduras more closely to drug transhipment and the criminal gangs that control it. A new TR4 strain of Panama disease threatens the remaining banana sector, now nominally controlled by farmers subcontracting with the US multinationals. It is surprising that Soluri devotes only about a page to the organic and fair trade ‘politics of consumption’ that have expanded exponentially in response to the abuses that he and others have charted in recent decades. This caveat notwithstanding, Banana Cultures remains essential reading on the social, cultural and ecological dimensions of the fruit and firms that transformed much of Central America.
