Dan Koeppel's Blog

The corporate banana monoculture, based on the Cavendish variety – which accounts for 99% of the world’s export crop – is both doomed and dangerous. Diseases are striking the world crop, forcing increased used of pesticides (when the diseases are curable, which isn’t always the case.) Reliance on a single, commodity fruit makes it impossible [...]

The reason we have only one kind of banana – out of the 1,000+ found worldwide – is partly an issue of transportation: every banana type ripens differently and has widely varying levels of fragility. In the 1950s, when the “original” commercial banana, the Gros Michel, was going functionally extinct, Dole came up with the [...]

PLUS: See the film in New York Wednesday, October 21, at 7:15 PM. Details here.

After pressure from the Swedish government  - efforts to boycott the banana company were underway, with a strong chance they would spread to other EU nations – Dole dropped a lawsuit it had filed against Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and [...]

The following is the original English text of an article I wrote for Dagens Nyheter, the largest daily newspaper in Sweden. The story is about Dole’s attempt to stop the distribution of “BANANAS!*”, a documentary made by Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten that the banana company believes to be untrue. The film is about lawsuits filed [...]

The Democracy Now radio program interviewed Nicholas Kozloff, who argued that there’s a Chiquita connection in the current Honduran political crisis, which saw President Manuel Zelaya deposed in either a coup or a constitutional emergency, or both, depending on which side you’re on, in June. The banana industry once made Honduras its largest exporting nation; [...]

The problem with Fair Trade bananas is that bananas are too cheap – there’s just not enough cash in the pipeline to make this strategy for bringing true “fairness” to the fruit effective (Fair Trade bananas cost, at most, just a few pennies more than conventional fruit; compare that to coffee and chocolate – two [...]

From Danforth’s flickr stream.
Writer/comedian Danforth France saw this Dole freighter unloading in San Diego while he was attending last week’s Comic-Con, and he sent me the linked tweet.
The ship is the Dole Honduras – one of two that constitute the banana giant’s Pacific fleet. The vessel makes over 20 annual north-south trips along a route that [...]

Huggable, lovable – but not the kind of baby banana that I’m talking about.
Though the vast majority of bananas we buy – statistically, all – are of the endangered Cavendish variety, there’s a good chance you’ve seen something else, these days and if you’re a banana-type (or have become one), you might have wondered: what [...]

That’s my beloved local Sev. To zoom in, you’ve got to go there. So go.
Interesting strategy at my favorite local convenience store, on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Rosemont In the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles (just steps from Dodger Stadium.)
Instead of the typical branded, presented-in-a-box fruit Chiquita is selling in many U.S. convenience [...]