Bananas Page 4
The debate was still raging at the end of August when the New York Produce Exchange began a campaign against the banana tax. As part of the campaign, Senator Root was asked to omit bananas from the tax “because they constituted the chief article of export ‘from a country [Jamaica] which has evinced, in such a substantial and almost unexampled manner, her friendship for the United States.’ ”32
On September 11 the New York Times announced that the House “MAY ABANDON BANANA TAX.” It was expected that House Democrats would insist on the rejection of the Senate amendment imposing a duty on bananas, even though the Senate expected to raise about $5,000,000 annually from bananas to offset revenue lost by shifting other articles to the free list.33 The Times reported that diplomatic representatives from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua called at the White House to give President Wilson petitions stating that a banana tax would be ruinous to their respective countries.
John Barrett, Director General of the Pan-American Union, in mid-September sent a letter of protest to the Senate and House conferences on the tariff bill in which he portrayed the banana as a powerful civilizing influence. According to Barrett “the building up of the banana business has done more than any other individual influence, material or political, to bring about conditions of prosperity, sanitation, health, and peace in those low-lying coast lines of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, which, previous to the banana era, were largely given up to wild jungles, malaria, shiftless peoples, and haunts of incipient revolutions.”34 The newspaper reported that one of the conferees suggested, after reading Barrett’s letter, that the dove of peace “should hereafter carry a banana in its beak instead of the useless, if ornamental, twig of myrtle.”
The banana tax was finally dropped from the Underwood-Simmons Bill and the New York Sun celebrated the decision with a headline that read: “THE TAX IS OFF! Bananas will be restored to the free list.—Joy Message from Washington,” and the following poem by E. T. Nelson:
Come all ye good citizens, raise
Your loudest hosannas,
With paeans of popular praise
For taxless bananas.
Food fit for the gods of Olympus,
For doughty Dianas
And heroes of legend: who’d skimp us
Of blessed bananas?
Meat fit for an Orient sultan,
For dusky sultanas—
The infant one or the adult un,
Soul-filling bananas!
Giuseppis and Abrahams eat ’em,
And Gretchens and Hannas,
Vox populi says you can’t beat ’em,
World-building bananas.
And whether it’s clay you’ll be smoking
Or fragrant Habanas,
None thinks you are lying or joking
If you praise bananas.
They’re slender and tender, nutritious,
Most mighty of mannas;
They’re yellow and mellow, delicious—
Praise be for bananas!
You tax us for air and for water,
For faith and bandannas;
We go like a lamb to the slaughter—
But halt! on bananas.
What sound from the northernmost mountain,
From southern savannahs?
The East and the West are thanks shoutin’
For untaxed bananas.35
World War I provided a new threat to the banana-import business, as it cut off trade between the Caribbean basin and the United States. At the outbreak of the war, the ships of the United States Merchant Marine began supplying necessary items to the Allied powers. By the time the United States declared war against Germany in April 1917, the shipping shortage was acute. United Fruit Company was required to lend thirty-seven of its largest ships to the war effort and other companies did likewise.36 The War Trade Board suggested a complete embargo on bananas in order to free more ships for military purposes. The embargo plan was dropped but banana imports were crippled by the lack of available ships. The Boston Globe noted in July 1918 the arrival of 20,000 bunches of bananas from Colombia in a United Fruit steamer and the great demand for the fruit.37 In November 1918 the headline “First Jamaican Bananas in Months” announced the imminent arrival of a banana ship to the port of Boston just as the Armistice was being signed. According to the Boston Globe, “scarcity of tonnage has seriously interfered with the imports of bananas at Atlantic ports since the beginning of the war.”38 Despite the scarcity, bananas continued to be available in Boston. A cartoon from July 16, 1918, with the caption “Accounting for the Mysterious Disappearance of Every One of the Banana Man’s Paper Bags,” showed children using the bags as gas masks while playing soldier.39 The banana business picked up again after the war and the volume of imports continued to increase throughout the 1920s as Americans consumed more and more bananas.
In addition to wars and taxes, the fruit companies had to cope with plant disease and economic depressions. In 1927 an official from the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited United Fruit Company plantations in Tela, Honduras, and wrote a prophetic report in which he noted that:
The economics of agriculture are rapidly changing all over the world. The increasing cost and instability of labor, the rapid decrease of virgin lands, the exhaustion of soils, and the cumulative effects of diseases and pests, all conspire to make it well worth while to plan a long way ahead for meeting the difficulties bound to arise. Plant introduction may not provide a substitute crop of the economic importance of the banana, but it may materially aid in stabilizing the banana industry and the organization around which the industry is built, through the utilization of land no longer available for bananas and which, for many reasons, can not be abandoned to the jungle.40
The worldwide economic depression beginning in the 1920s and extending throughout most of the 1930s, coupled with banana plant disease epidemics, hit the new international fruit companies hard. Banana prices dropped sharply in 1930 with demand for bananas falling as well. By 1932 the price of United Fruit company stock had dropped from more than $100.00 to $10.25 a share.41 Samuel Zemurray’s shares were now worth only $2,000,000 and he was furious. He obtained proxies from other large shareholders and went to Boston to seize control of the company. The Board of Directors appointed Zemurray managing director with dictatorial powers. He proceeded to fire surplus workers and cut the price the company paid for bananas it bought from independent growers. Within a month, the price of United Fruit stock more than doubled and the company was back in running order.42
Zemurray also brought changes to the way United Fruit Company did business in Central America. “Well aware of the hatred of Central Americans not lucky enough to share its prosperity, he tempered the irresponsible tactics that had served well enough in the freebooting days of dollar diplomacy.”43 Schools were built and staffed for workers’ children and company hospitals were opened to all. In 1944 an agricultural school was opened in Honduras to train Central American farmers. In the new plantations on the Pacific coast, the company provided housing for workers that included kitchens and flush toilets. Minimum wages remained at less than a dollar a day although this was more than other local workers earned. Despite these reforms, postwar Central American governments began insisting on labor codes that required social security payments, hospitalization at company expense, and overtime pay.44
World War II almost brought the banana importing business to a complete halt. At the beginning of the war, the British government declared the banana a luxury, and in 1940 the sale of Jamaican bananas to the United Kingdom was halted. Deprived of its major market, Jamaica’s production fell to the level needed for local consumption only.45 The entire British-flag fleet of United Fruit Company was chartered to the British government.46
The United States government felt the same way about bananas, but saw a need to support the commerce of the small exporting nations in the Caribbean as long as possible. United Fruit chartered and sold some of its ships to the United States during 194
1. All remaining ships were taken over by the United States government in 1942 for the duration of the war.47 German submarine activity, the requisitioning of ships by the U.S. Navy, and the absorption of labor by the military, reduced banana imports from an average of 55 million stems per year during the 1930s to a low of 24 million in 1943.
When banana freighters were diverted for military purposes, the fruit was left to rot in the fields. A black market for bananas developed in the southern ports with high profits to the middlemen.48 The shipping business was slow to recover from the war, being dependent upon those ships that had survived the war. Many of them were old and undermaintained.49 Time magazine announced in March 1946 that banana trains were rolling again in Central America and that 100,000,000 bananas had arrived in the United States the previous week.50 When price ceilings were lifted, bananas sold at a high price for some time having “something of the attraction of a novelty.”51 When the war ended, imports rose once again to 54 million stems in 1946.52
During the first half of the twentieth century, the expanding market for bananas was supplied by a steady extension of production, turning millions of acres of jungle into banana plantations, rather than by increases in yield per acre of land or per banana plant until disease forced the companies to switch to new varieties in the 1950s. Growing wild in the jungle or in small clumps in dooryards, banana plants had not been particularly susceptible to disease. Now bananas were grown by the thousands on large plantations: monoculture invited disaster.
As long as vast expanses of virgin jungle remained in Central America, when disease appeared the fruit companies could abandon their plantations and move on. By 1926 nearly 100,000 acres of jungle turned plantation had been abandoned throughout Central America.53 The disease problem in Panama became critical once 20 percent of the banana land had been left behind.54 As suitable land became scarce and more expensive, the companies turned to chemical herbicides and pesticides to try to control plant diseases and insect pests. Philippe Bourgois argues that United Fruit’s managers actually dragged their feet in research against banana diseases as a way to maintain control of the business. The high costs of pesticides and spraying made it prohibitively expensive for other companies to compete.55
Sigatoka, or Cercospora musae zimm, is a fungus spread by windblown spores that attack the leaves of the banana plant and cause the fruit to ripen prematurely.56 Healthy-looking bananas infected with sigatoka ripened aboard ship in mid-ocean and rotted before they reached port. The disease was first observed in Java in 1903, and by 1922 it had crippled banana production in Australia and New Zealand, southern China, Thailand, and Malaysia, and had spread westward to India, the Guinea coast of Africa, and the Canary Islands. Sigatoka arrived in the Americas in the late 1920s or early 1930s. By 1935 it threatened to wipe out the entire Standard Fruit crop in Honduras.57 In 1937 all the major banana-growing countries except Ecuador and Peru were affected, but by 1950 it had spread to these countries as well.58 The companies considered rotating sugar with bananas and also experimented with growing cacao, cotton, rice, pineapple, and coconuts on worn-out or previously abandoned banana land.59
United Fruit Company began a large-scale, fixed-pipe, copper-sulfate spraying program in 1935.60 A standard fungicide called Bordeaux mixture, made up of copper sulfate, hydrated lime, and water, was sprayed weekly on banana plants to treat Sigatoka.61 It was effective but the cost of spraying was exorbitant.62 Bordeaux mixture turned everything whitish-blue—the plants, the ground, and the men themselves—and lasted for days. Some growers tried dusting the plants with powdered lime from airplanes. Plane dusting proved to be less effective than liquid spray, and was gradually discontinued.63 In the 1940s, diesel-powered giant water towers replaced irrigation ditches on the banana plantations. They could spray up to two inches of water a day over the plants during the dry season and were also used to spray Bordeaux mixture.64 In some places, plantations were interlaced with pipes carrying the fungicide.
Spraying meant extra processing and handling when harvesting bananas because Bordeaux mixture “could eat the bottom out of a ship if it ever became mixed with salt water during the sea trip.”65 Before shipping, each bunch of fruit first had to be dipped into a cleaning solution of mild muriatic acid to remove the Bordeaux mixture and then dipped into a tank of water to remove the cleanser.66 A side effect of this process was to eliminate any tarantulas, snakes, and other creatures that might be clinging to the bananas.
In the late 1950s, based on research in Guadaloupe, an oil-based spray for sigatoka control was developed.67 Companies also experimented with aerial spraying of banana plantations with DDT and carbaryl to prevent insect damage. Sprayed plantations began to suffer widespread and increasingly severe outbreaks of defoliation. Evidence that plantations that were never sprayed did not suffer the heavy defoliations put a halt to wholesale spraying with insecticides in the early 1970s.68
A second major plant disease attacked banana plants in Panama in 1903. It was a fusarial wilt, known as Panama disease or mal de Panama, that attacked the roots of the plant, cutting off the water supply and choking the plant to death.69 Thousands of acres of banana plantations had to be abandoned, and by 1910 the disease had spread to Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, reaching Honduras in 1926. Some growers continued to struggle against it; others moved their operations to virgin land.70 In 1935 the Honduran town of Puerto Castilla was abandoned, along with 125 kilometers of railway that served the region.71 By the 1940s production of bananas was almost paralyzed by the disease, and companies moved their plantations to the Pacific coast.72
In the 1950s disease and strong winds decimated the Gros Michel banana plants that had been the mainstay of the imported banana trade for the past fifty years. Fruit companies began to experiment with new disease-resistant varieties of bananas that were also less prone to be blown down in wind storms, and their fortunes began to recover. During the early 1950s in the Caribbean islands, and in the late 1950s in Honduras, plantations were converted to wilt-resistant varieties of the Cavendish subgroup of banana plants.73 Cavendish varieties were planted throughout Central America, Panama, and South America by 1970.74
The yield per unit of land more than doubled with the new varieties. Cavendish plants yielded between 2,500 and 3,000 eighteen-kilogram boxes per hectare compared with 1,000–1,200 boxes for Gros Michel. Instead of ever-expanding banana plantations, the new high-yield plants resulted in the release of large areas of land formerly planted with Gros Michel now held in reserve for other crops and livestock.75
In the 1960s large tracts of suitable virgin land were no longer available in Central America, and growers there were forced to replant their fields with the new disease-resistant bananas. By 1970 the conversion was completed. In South America, the conversion began in the late 1960s and was completed by 1975 with the exception of an area of Gros Michel plantations in northern Ecuador grown mostly for home consumption.76 Today the Cavendish is the standard large yellow banana found in grocery stores and supermarkets. The changeover and increased yield of the new plants resulted in the first widespread oversupply of bananas in 1971, with accompanying depressed prices. A second glut of fruit occurred in 1982 with heavy losses for the banana-importing companies.77
Banana growers in Honduras faced yet another crisis in 1972 when a fungus called black sigatoka began attacking the leaves of the Cavendish banana plants. The fungus was airborne and destroyed the leaves of the plant which are critical for shielding the young fruit.78 Black sigatoka was much more virulent than its predecessor and reduced the yield from each plant by 30 to 50 percent.79 By the early 1980s, the fungus had spread from Honduras to the rest of Central America, and by 1987 it had reached Ecuador. In that year, Central American banana growers spent $100 million to control the disease, in some areas nearly a third of the total growing costs.80
Today growers control sigatoka and the new strains of Panama disease that attack the Cavendish plants with fungicides, but scientists worry that the
diseases are developing a tolerance to the latest generation of chemical weapons. Banana plantations around the world are in trouble; in West and Central Africa, banana harvests have been cut in half since the mid-1980s.81
The answer may be the development of a new disease-resistant banana to succeed the Cavendish. Philip Rowe, a plant breeder who has worked for United Fruit and is now working for a Honduran agricultural research foundation, has spent the past twenty years looking for a better banana. His current candidate, the Goldfinger, thrives in different parts of the world but is not yet an acceptable dessert banana. Taste panels have described the fruit as “too acidic and too starchy.”82 Rowe’s current research is using a dwarf Gros Michel banana to develop Goldfinger II, hoping to produce a reasonable facsimile and substitute for the Cavendish.
In the 1960s yet another banana pest began to attack banana plants when nematodes, microscopic worms that feed on the roots of plants, began to multiply dramatically. Dow Chemical and Shell Oil came up with dibromochloropropane (DBCP) that killed the nematodes without hurting the plants. Workers mixed the chemical with water and injected it into the soil around the base of the banana plants with giant hypodermic needles. Banana yields increased by 30 percent and DBCP was widely used. Unfortunately the chemical is indicated in damaging the testicles and reducing sperm count in laboratory animals, and has been linked with fertility problems in the workers on banana plantations and in the United States. DBCP has been banned in the continental United States since 1979 but it is still used in banana-producing countries.83