Izzy Brooks finds in the ever-popular banana a ubiquitous and potent artefact of the imperialism and modern corporate power that gave us ‘banana republics’, worker exploitation and the human transformation of the natural world through standardisation of a monocultural crop with high chemical dependency and increased environmental vulnerability to disease.
Museum of the Anthropocene: The Banana
Why a Banana? One of the most iconic and popular forms of fruit worldwide, but also an artefact of imperialism and of human transformation of the natural world.
Thought to have originated in Southeast Asia, the banana was introduced to American markets in the late 1800s and quickly became a consumer phenomenon. It was even exhibited at the 1867 World’s Fair in the USA, alongside Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone – bananas were that novel, and that popular.
The rapid growth of the banana market meant it quickly required a complicated framework of organisation and funding to ensure bananas were able to be taken from their point of growth to the consumer without spoiling. A single banana may travel between 2,000 and 6,000 miles by water before it reaches the shelves. As such, it was only large, influential companies with the required infrastructure that could take advantage of this banana gold-rush. Enter the United Fruit Company.
The United Fruit Company (UFC) was founded in 1899 and rapidly became the dominating force in Central and South America’s banana market. The power and influence of this company during the late 1800s to mid-1900s cannot be underestimated. The UFC became one of the first modern examples of a corporation that blurs the lines between being a dominant market actor, and being its own form of government. In this respect, it followed in the footsteps of the likes of the British East India Company. The UFC wanted control over all aspects of its workers’ lives, including the housing in which they lived, and by paying workers in ‘vouchers’ which could only be used in designated UFC commissaries. Inhumane living conditions were seen across the various countries where the UFC set up banana plantations. And as well as standardising the lives of its workers, it worked to standardise the genetics of the bananas being grown – something that would later prove to be a serious issue.
Many Central American countries became so dependent on the UFC that they were essentially being governed by them – eventually being dubbed the ‘Banana Republics’. By the 1950s, the UFC owned 50% of Guatemala’s land, as well as all of its railway and radio infrastructure. The UFC would even go on to plant fake rumours of communism in Guatemala, which led to the CIA being directly involved in overthrowing the Guatemalan president and replacing him with someone with friendly views towards US-based business – convenient for the US-based UFC.
The UFC engaged in monoculture farming – the cultivation of one singular, standardised crop. This style of plantation agriculture invites a host of environmental issues, such as high pesticide use and soil degradation. It also created a crisis for the UFC in the 1950s, as the Panama Disease fungus spread rapidly through the banana plantations, ultimately leading to the almost complete disappearance of the ‘Gros Michel’ banana which had started the banana-craze.
The most common banana we eat today is the Cavendish Banana. But, although once thought to have been disease-resistant and the saviour of the Banana Republics, it too is now under threat as another disease is spreading through these monoculture plantations. The story of the banana is therefore a powerful parable of the Anthropocene – of human efforts to standardise, control and extract profit from nature; of the explosion of consumer desire; and of the troubling consequences of our dependence on a diminished biome. Will we soon be eating a new type of banana again, with the hunt for profit and the neglect of the environment continuing apace, or will we find ways to place our eating habits and our agricultural practices on a more sustainable footing?
Notes
The banana was contributed by Izzy Brooks. Izzy says: “‘Human Geography of the Anthropocene’ became one of my favourite modules I did at the UEA. I’ve found that it has continued to inspire me in my day-to-day life to consider how seemingly mundane artefacts can encapsulate the complex relationships between physical geography and human politics, culture and history.”