Why Bananas Are a Parable for Our Times

[raccoon]

Published on Thursday, May 22, 2008 by The Independent/UK

Why Bananas Are a Parable for Our Times

by Johann Hari

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.

(snip)

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.

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.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/21/9126/


Great article about bananas and how Latin American countries were exploited by the Empire.

[ramapo]

1. Damn, I love bananas

There's much more to bananas then I ever imagined. Somebody must've written a book on the subject. But the thought of no more bananas is quite sobering.

[maryf]

2. I love em too, they are a perfect food

and help me sleep every night...between the bananas and the cave bats with their mystery diseases we're in for a sad state of affairs...

[raccoon]

3. Also, they're a good source of potassium. I take one to work every day. nt

[Warpy]

5. Take heart, there are resistant varieties

The big yellow jobs in the supermarkets are actually relatively flavorless compared to most of the other varieties. What the other varieties lack is size.

Bananas come in lots of colors, from deep golden to bright pinkish orange. Most of the other varieties are three to five inches long and mostly peel, but the flavor wallop inside makes peeling several to get the equivalent of one commercial yellow banana worth it. All share the vitamins and minerals of the big commercial bananas.

My own favorites are the pink ones, but I do like them all.

That's the best news: they're not going away completely. Only one variety is going away, the monoculture species favored by Chiquita and Dole in the countries they've been helping ruin for years. The wild varieties are resistant to disease and one hopes the the cultivated types will take the hothouse colonial oligarchy with them when they go.

[raccoon]

8. Thanks for the encouraging words!

Sorely needed in these times. :hi:

[izquierdista]

4. That was a depressing read

Fascist politics destroying the environment. After that, I need something inspiring to read that promises a better future for all if we just work together. Something like this: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11879#toc

[Mika]

6. American Cubaphobes complain about United Fruit getting kicked out of Cuba by the revolution.

That EVILDOER Castro wrested control of Cuba out of the hands of corporate oligarchy.

Cuba is now a world leader in organic farming.

- -

Before the 1959 revolution

75% of rural dwellings were huts made from palm trees.

More than 50% had no toilets of any kind.

85% had no inside running water.

91% had no electricity.

There was only 1 doctor per 2,000 people in rural areas.

More than one-third of the rural population had intestinal parasites.

Only 4% of Cuban peasants ate meat regularly; only 1% ate fish, less than 2% eggs, 3% bread, 11% milk; none ate green vegetables.

The average annual income among peasants was $91 (1956), less than 1/3 of the national income per person.

45% of the rural population was illiterate; 44% had never attended a school.

25% of the labor force was chronically unemployed.

1 million people were illiterate ( in a population of about 5.5 million).

27% of urban children, not to speak of 61% of rural children, were not attending school.

Racial discrimination was widespread.

The public school system had deteriorated badly.

Corruption was endemic; anyone could be bought, from a Supreme Court judge to a cop.

Police brutality and torture were common.

___



After the 1959 revolution
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/185.html

“It is in some sense almost an anti-model,” according to Eric Swanson, the programme manager for the Bank’s Development Data Group, which compiled the WDI, a tome of almost 400 pages covering scores of economic, social, and environmental indicators.

Indeed, Cuba is living proof in many ways that the Bank’s dictum that economic growth is a pre-condition for improving the lives of the poor is over-stated, if not, downright wrong.

-

It has reduced its infant mortality rate from 11 per 1,000 births in 1990 to seven in 1999, which places it firmly in the ranks of the western industrialised nations. It now stands at six, according to Jo Ritzen, the Bank’s Vice President for Development Policy, who visited Cuba privately several months ago to see for himself.

By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Argentina stood at 18 in 1999;

Chile’s was down to ten; and Costa Rica, at 12. For the entire Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, the average was 30 in 1999.

Similarly, the mortality rate for children under the age of five in Cuba has fallen from 13 to eight per thousand over the decade. That figure is 50% lower than the rate in Chile, the Latin American country closest to Cuba’s achievement. For the region as a whole, the average was 38 in 1999.

“Six for every 1,000 in infant mortality - the same level as Spain - is just unbelievable,” according to Ritzen, a former education minister in the Netherlands. “You observe it, and so you see that Cuba has done exceedingly well in the human development area.”

Indeed, in Ritzen’s own field, the figures tell much the same story. Net primary enrolment for both girls and boys reached 100% in 1997, up from 92% in 1990. That was as high as most developed nations - higher even than the US rate and well above 80-90% rates achieved by the most advanced Latin American countries.

“Even in education performance, Cuba’s is very much in tune with the developed world, and much higher than schools in, say, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile.”

It is no wonder, in some ways. Public spending on education in Cuba amounts to about 6.7% of gross national income, twice the proportion in other Latin American and Caribbean countries and even Singapore.

There were 12 primary school pupils for every Cuban teacher in 1997, a ratio that ranked with Sweden, rather than any other developing country. The Latin American and East Asian average was twice as high at 25 to one.

The average youth (age 15-24) illiteracy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at 7%. In Cuba, the rate is zero. In Latin America, where the average is 7%, only Uruguay approaches that achievement, with one percent youth illiteracy.

“Cuba managed to reduce illiteracy from 40% to zero within ten years,” said Ritzen. “If Cuba shows that it is possible, it shifts the burden of proof to those who say it’s not possible.”

Similarly, Cuba devoted 9.1% of its gross domestic product (GDP) during the 1990s to health care, roughly equivalent to Canada’s rate. Its ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people was the highest in the world.

The question that these statistics pose, of course, is whether the Cuban experience can be replicated. The answer given here is probably not.

“What does it, is the incredible dedication,” according to Wayne Smith, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has travelled to the island many times since.

-

[Judi Lynn]

9. Mika, I think I've read Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart's dad Rafael was once a lawyer working for

United Fruit in Cuba, back before he became a senator, and a Batista cabinet member.

Thanks for your data on Cuba's living conditions prior to and after the revolution.

[Forrest Greene]

7. Bananas Are My Favorite

...because they have appeal.

[knitter4democracy]

10. And the chemicals they use on them are off-the-charts insane.

A friend of mine in college was on her semester of study abroad in Costa Rica, and the group went to a banana plantation. As they started in, walking in the field, she got really dizzy and passed out. They had to drag her out, and she didn't come to for awhile. They found out that it had been recently sprayed. She never ate bananas again after that.

If the chemicals are strong enough to make an adult human pass out, what the heck are they doing to the workers and to the local environment?!