by afew
Thu Jun 19th, 2008 at 05:11:29 AM EST
Johann Hari in The Independent tells an edifying tale:
Johann Hari: Why bananas are a parable for our times - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent
...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.
Panama Disease is caused by a fusarium fungus. Chemical treatments don't eradicate it, and other methods are cumbersome and inadequate: uprooting diseased plants and burning them along with half a tonne of rice hulls to kill the soil pathogen, to take one example. Possibly new resistant hybrids will be developed, but they're unlikely to have the flavour, sweetness, and texture of the yellow bananas developed nations import. Yet the bananas we eat now, cultivars of the Cavendish type, are already a fusarium-resistant replacement for the better-tasting Gros Michel, that ended up by being wiped out in the mid-twentieth century by an earlier version of Panama Disease. The fusarium that's going the rounds now is a different strain that began to proliferate in the 1980s.
So Nature's a bitch. She doesn't want us to have the big-flavour sweet meltingness of our beloved bananas. This is what she does:
That was a Cavendish plantation in Malaysia, 1995. Did I say plantation?
Originally published on May 23 - Bumped by Migeru
| Here's a plantation, in Honduras. The bananas are Cavendish type, waiting to be destroyed, like the Gros Michel type they replaced.
Plantations are big.
Plantations are monocultures.
Plantations are colonial...
| |  |
Oops, I should talk about "trade" rather than colonies. Colonies are something that used to happen long ago. Countries had colonies. Companies trading in faraway foodstuffs never had colonies, did they? Check out the Dutch East India Company, you say? And it isn't the only example? All right, let's see what Johann Hari says:
Johann Hari: Why bananas are a parable for our times - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent
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.
United Fruit isn't around any more, of course. Neither is Standard Fruit. Look at the stickers on your bananas. Chiquita? Dole? Look no further.
Read here for recent news of Chiquita, one of the biggest and most powerful food marketing and distributing companies in the world
So we, and Hari, were talking about a badass disease that is going to stop us getting nice bananas, and perhaps we should get back to that instead of digressing about multinational food and agriculture corporations and their more or less tyrannical colonial tendencies. Right. Plantations are big long-term monocultures. They zero in on a narrow selection of plant types (just one in the case of the banana) because these correspond to the needs of cost-cutting efficiency, long-distance transport, and market appeal in the rich countries. (This has nothing to do with what went before, of course.)
And the result is, they create the conditions for their own demise. They produce imbalance, and the narrowness of their selection makes them vulnerable. They are not sustainable.
So Gaia wins? Not so simple. As Hari tells us Until 150 [years] 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. That biodiversity is now under threat because the monoculture of the marketable sweet yellow banana has provided for the proliferation of an unstoppable pathogen. Some varieties will resist, others will not. And foodwise, 85% of the world's banana production is locally consumed. The banana is also allied to the plantain, a staple in a number of parts of the world, also susceptible to Panama Disease.
No victory in sight there.
