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 to do anything but exploit workers and land – it would be too expensive to do otherwise. The banana industry, however, refuses to budge from the monoculture, for the most part, saying it is impossible to import any other variety in bulk.
But that’s exactly what is being done in so-called ethnic markets. Here’s a shot I took last month of an alternate variety, commonly known as “apple” bananas, being sold under the Manhattan Bridge in New York’s Chinatown.
What does this mean? The fruit comes from Del Monte, one of the world’s largest banana importers (though it isn’t a major presence in the U.S.) I’d ask the question: does “impossible” mean that systems really can’t be developed, or that the major banana outfits – Dole and Chiquita – are simply afraid (or lack the creativity) to run their banana business as anything but the boring, exploitative, and doomed entity of the past century?
By the way, those under-the-bridge fruit are amazingly good. Try one – let it ripen to a rather brown, speckled state, a little more than you might for a conventional banana – and you’ll be rewarded with complex flavor, creamy texture, and pure fruit satisfaction.
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 idea of bagging and boxing a potential replacement fruit – the Cavendish – in order to allow it to survive the long trip from the tropics to our stores. The plan worked, and the banana industry was saved.
Today, as disease ravages the global Cavendish crop, packing and shipping technologies are once again becoming key to replacing the commercial fruit. At the same time, bananas compete more and more with candy and other junk food at convenience stores, where branding and presentation beyond an oval sticker might be a plus (at least in terms of marketing.)
Del Monte and 7-Eleven seem to believe just that and have begun, at about 30 stores near the convenience store giant’s Dallas headquarters, a small retail test of bagged and branded bananas. The packaging is designed to extend the shelf-life of the fruit from two to five days. (I’m not sure how the convenience store chain came up with those timeframes, actually. Bananas should be able to stay on sale for more than 48 hours if handled properly.) “Our customers want yellow bananas — not brown,” Joseph DePinto, CEO of the convenience chain, told USA Today. (I’ve written about convenience store fruit before. It hasn’t really worked out that well for the big banana companies.)
Since I’m not in Texas, I haven’t handled the packaging, but from the picture, it looks a lot like something a high-end produce distributor called Melissa’s uses for plantain sold in California supermarkets; Chiquita also made a try with a similar form of packaging a few years ago. It used a membrane-like coating and a special device that separated the fruit; the system was designed by a Boston consultancy called Gen3 Partners; you can read about the product here.
In a published case study, Gen3 quotes Chiquita as saying: “We have been in business for over one hundred years. We need to shake up our markets with new innovation.” Environmentalists rightly see this kind of innovation as problematic, and I agree, but with mixed feelings. I’d be happy if the new wrappers somehow made the fruit a more likely buy – over junk food – at convenience stores.
The bigger issue is that new production technology is desperately needed in the banana world – though not necessarily to make the fruit a convenience store favorite. The fruit industry continues to rely on Cavendish, and only Cavendish. That fruit is doomed (read my book or see this article), and no amount of packaging can change that. But in order to save bananas as a consumer product, the industry will need to develop new technologies to deliver new bananas to consumers – just as Dole did fifty years ago, and tougher, ripeness-delaying packaging will be a part of that. Is this particular experiment a step in the right direction? Not sure – but it is a step.
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 against Dole by Nicaraguan workers claiming to have been injured by the company’s use of a pesticide called Nemagon, or DBCP. In 2007, those workers achieved a partial victory against the banana company – but a follow-up suit was dismissed earlier this year after lawyers for the fruit giant offered evidence that the lawyer for the laborers had falsified information (here’s one of many news accounts about the trial’s denouement.)
Here, I explain why I find that “evidence” unconvincing – and why Dole’s suit has roots not just in a century of banana industry history, but also in a business model that persists to this day. For background on the issue, have a look at the filmmaker’s timeline or at Dole’s entire page on Nemagon. More links below.
THE BURNING OF THE LA CEIBA, HONDURAS TOWN HALL in 1903 was the work of more than an ordinary arsonist. Gone in the flames were birth records, marriage certificates, and hundreds of other municipal documents. But the most valuable files lost were property deeds. All of a sudden, what was owned in the town and the fields around it was an open question. La Ceiba was surrounded by banana plantations, planted by an American businessman named Joseph Vaccaro. How strange it was, some residents said, that Mr. Vaccaro had grown bananas on land owned by others, promising a share of profits, and now there was no proof that the people he’d made commitments to owned anything at all. Stranger was that, following the inferno, many parcels into the hands of Mr. Vaccaro and his company, Standard Fruit.
The La Ceiba episode is little remembered. But I couldn’t help think of it as I stood on line at the Los Angeles International Film Festival last month, forced to read a carefully worded disclaimer in order to gain admittance to the documentary I’d come to see. The film told the story of Dole – Standard Fruit renamed itself in 1991 – and the company’s use of a toxic pesticide in the 1970s. The main character was an attorney representing Nicaraguan workers who claimed to have been injured by that pesticide, and their 2007 lawsuit against the banana company. The lawsuit – and the film – ends with the workers winning a $5.8 million jury award.
Standard Fruit founder and banana bad-ass Joseph Vaccaro; image: Louisiana State Archives
Two years later, a second banana case, filed by the same attorney, was dismissed after Dole investigators presented evidence that the attorney had committed fraud. At the film festival, it didn’t seem to matter that the accusation was being disputed, or that the case in question was not the one the film documented, or that the dangers of the chemical the banana workers were exposed to was well-established. Not even the filmmaker’s record of integrity – let alone responsibility a global event dedicated to the expression of ideas and creativity might have to those higher ideals – prevented the terrified festival from removing Fredrik Gertten’s “BANANAS!*” from competition.
Since then, Dole has sued Gertten, and if it succeeds, it is unlikely that the film will ever again be seen in America. Such an action leaves no smolders, no charred remains. But if if you understand the banana industry, you’ll understand that fire – real and virtual – is part of the business model.
YOU’VE JUST PAID FOR A BUNCH OF BANANAS. What you’ve purchased is the most popular fruit in the world, and the cheapest, in nearly every country they’re sold. This hasn’t happened by chance. Supreme affordability has been the industry’s driving strategy since the first bunches were delivered to an unfamiliar American public in the late 19th century. Companies like United Fruit – now Chiquita – and Standard Fruit had to teach the public what a banana was. Part of getting them to try this strange product was making it a bargain.
Bananas are a fragile, tropical product. They rot quickly. They are grown oceans from where they are sold and eaten, and need to be shipped under refrigeration. Like no other fruit, bananas are heavily advertised and marketed. In other words, bananas should be expensive.
The best place for the banana companies to save money was where the fruit was grown. Joseph Vaccaro understood this. So did the future CEO of Chiquita, Sam Zemurray, who took over the entire nation of Honduras in 1910. These actions were just the beginning. Often with with the help of U.S. troops, banana companies intervened in Latin America more than twenty times between 1900 and 1960.
Concentrating the base of profit into a single-product industrial supply chain is dangerous. Anything that threatened to upset the equation and raise banana prices had to be crushed. In 1954, when Guatemalans elected a president who promised land reform, Chiquita – terrified that the movement would spread through Central America, engineered a CIA coup, ushering in three decades of instability that led to the Mayan genocide of the 1980s. The bananas kept growing.
Even nature – if it poses a threat – must come under massive attack. 1,000 varieties of banana grow worldwide, but the business model allows just a single breed to make up the thirty billion kilograms (sixty-six billion pounds) of fruit sold each year, creating a supply chain as primed for economy as the one that brings us hamburgers at McDonald’s. But this global plantation of identical twins means that when disease hits, it spreads far and fast, raising prices, wrecking the equation. The banana breed originally introduced to the world, called Gros Michel, was actually wiped out by such a disease. As farms were left useless by the blight, more and more land had to be taken. Finally, there was nowhere left to grow the fruit, and the industry replaced Gros Michel with today’s variety, called “Cavendish.” The changeover was so expensive that Chiquita, already weakened by the crisis, teetered on the verge of bankruptcy for years afterward (today, a new strain of the same disease is killing Cavendish – and a new banana land rush is underway in Africa. The industry claims the two are unrelated.)
In the 1970s, banana companies fought a root-destroying worm with a chemical called Nemagon. It was used throughout the world, but it was Dole’s actions in Nicaragua that were the basis of the 2007 case and Gertten’s film, which tells the story of workers who claimed to have been left sterile by Nemagon. The workers are brought to America by Juan Dominguez, a Los Angeles attorney known for winning awards for clients injured in car wrecks. The trial (and the film) ends with some workers receiving awards, and some not, but the verdict is strong enough for Dominguez to continue with a second suit. That suit was continuing this past April, just as Gertten was preparing his film – completed a few months earlier – for the festival debut.
Our banana: the Cavendish. Image from hobotraveler.com.
THE SELL-CHEAP STRATEGY IS AS FRAGILE AS EVER. The question is whether the industry is still willing to go to desperate lengths to preserve it. The answer – at least sometimes – appears to be yes. In 2007, Chiquita was fined $25 million by the U.S. justice department for making payments to Colombian paramilitaries. The company said the money was to protect workers, and not because the cost of land and labor are generally cheaper when regulated by force of arms. Dole is now under investigation for similar actions.
In 1992, a damaging report appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the daily newspaper of Chiquita’s headquarters city. Chiquita sued after it was revealed that the reporter who wrote the story had illegally hacked into its corporate voice mail system. The newspaper retracted the entire report, fired the journalist – who later pled guilty to theft – and paid the banana company $14 million, even though the facts of the story were not in dispute. For the next decade, the paper didn’t publish a single critical story about the banana company. But that wasn’t enough; Chiquita demanded – and received – control over the paper’s newsroom for well into the next decade, according to a report published in a journalism trade review.
When an individual challenges a banana company, humiliation has been part of the tactics. After Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown, he was paraded before the press in his underwear. He later committed suicide.
In the film, Dominguez reveals that his strategy is to start by winning a small suits and then build, and build. It wasn’t just Dole he wanted to take down. It was the whole banana industry. He considered the mixed verdict in the first case good enough to continue, but it all came to an end when Dole presented evidence, gathered in Nicaragua, that Dominguez’s team had coached witnesses. The U.S. judge dismissed the case with a statement that implied that everything known about banana companies, banana workers, and pesticides was now questionable: “We’ll never know,” she said, “if anybody…was was actually injured.”
That’s false. In Gertten’s film, you’ll see Dole’s CEO, under oath, admit that the company continued to use Nemagon after it knew the chemical was harmful. You’ll see the first jury apparently acting fairly, since it finds for some plaintiffs, and rules against others. You’ll see families and clinics and workers in Nicaragua. Not mentioned in the film is the fact that Dole paid over $20 million in prior Nemagon settlements, some dating as far back as 1992.
Above: BANANAS!* trailer. Below: Dole’s response.
Success in the Los Angeles Film Festival for “BANANAS!*” would have been a step beyond basic media coverage of a trial in progress. It could have meant distribution on U.S. television. It would have told the story of Nemagon to people in Dole’s home country. That Dole’s first attempts to stop BANANAS!* from showing came even before the company viewed the film saw isn’t a surprise. I’m encouraged that Gertten is now represented by a prominent free speech attorney in the U.S. I hope – and believe – he will win his case, but more importantly, I think it is important for Americans to see the film, and soon. In the meantime, they need to known that a banana company – of all things – doesn’t trust their judgement enough to watch an hour of footage it sees as unflattering and decide for themselves who and what is credible.
As far as the bigger case, there are several questions. The first is why the judge accepted the conclusions of Dole’s investigators, but rejected those of Dominguez’s. In Nicaragua, it is being argued that there was no difference between the kinds of people the teams were composed of, the types of interviews they conducted, or the evidence they presented. It is important to note that Dole ignored a decision against it delivered in a Nicaraguan court. In fact, starting with the 1992 verdicts, Dole’s Nemagon record in the courtroom has been spectacularly awful. This is a company that either did what it is being accused of, or has the worst lawyers a corporation has ever hired (this should encourage Gertten.)
Despite what Dole would like the public to believe, it received no absolution in the 2009 case. The company’s actions weren’t about Nemagon and Nicaraguan plantation workers. Instead, it focused on destroying Juan Dominguez, who is now fighting for his career. It had to prevent a cascade of losses across Latin America that might ultimately upset its business model as it forced banana prices to rise. This serves as a warning to anyone – including those currently suing Dole for alleged pesticide misuse in Ecuador, and even in the case of Colombian families attempting to hold Chiquita accountable for the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of the paid-off paramilitaries – that a challenge could result in huge personal losses. There’s no better evidence of how much Dole thought was at stake than the price it is attempting to get Dominguez (and Gertten) to pay.
Campaigning: Searches lead to Dole's paid point-of-view
Those stakes are real, but the habits of a century are also involved. In either case, there’s only one way to push the industry toward fairness and more humane policies. Bananas have to stop being cheap. The business model of the banana industry must be rejected by consumers. A new banana market needs to emerge, with multiple varieties of fruit, at varying price levels. It should begin with rejection of corporate bananas, and encouragement of Fair Trade growers to expand into alternate varieties. Adopted at the corporate level, this kind of strategy cold – ironically – insulate the banana companies from their one-banana-fits-all profit dependence. But that old reflex is primed for battle, not innovation. So far, though, the banana giants haven’t figured out how to sue shoppers, and our voices can’t be suppressed. There are too many supermarkets in the world. Even Big Banana can’t burn them all.
More info: “Dole: Behind the Smoke Screen” was published in 2006 by the advocacy group BananaLink and COLSIBA, an umbrella group for banana workers’ unions in Latin America. Here’s a link to an older document – “DBCP: The Legacy” that includes images of correspondence between Dole and the makers of Nemagon, Shell and Dow Chemical. For more on the banana business model, read my op-ed in the New York Times. There’s lots more info available, and a Google search now yields a bonus: Dole wants to be sure that have the chance to hear what it has to say, and is willing to pay to do it. Also: Not long after filing the suit, Dole announced its intention transform itself from what the world’s largest privately-held food supplier into a public one, with an initial public offering of stock planned, most likely, for 2010. It isn’t surprising that a company whose value was about to be determined in the open marketplace would strike hard against anyone or anything it saw as a threat to that value.
Philippine Lacatan banana tree at market – from the extensive and fascinating Market Manilla website. The Lacatan is the Philippine’s “comfort food” banana, and one of the world’s most delicious.
One of the most frustrating elements of fighting banana disease (or any disease) is that quarantine actually works – but only in theory. For over a century, attempts to isolate infected bananas from healthy ones have been attempted, and failed. These efforts have, in fact, generally made things worse, because they’ve often been accompanied by denial on the part of banana producers that the problem needs to be attacked on other levels, as well (or denial that quarantine is mostly ineffective.)
But clean farming can make a difference: it can boost crop yields, and slow the spread of disease – crucially important to subsistence farmers, for whom even cutting a percentage of loss can be lifesaving. And there have been considerable successes in some recent quarantine programs. Pakistani officials are now offering a pilot program in managing banana diseases that’s different from traditional efforts, which have usually involved in the field training. This one is all-electronic. In my book, I describe how ambitious field programs in Pakistan failed in the early part of this decade. I don’t know whether on-site instruction works better than these self-paced versions – but the Philippines is both a banana paradise (with huge plantations and breeding variety) and a center of banana disease, so the effort is absolutely necessary.
Here’s how the course introduces itself to first-time participants:
“Have you experienced tremendous yield loss in your banana due to diseases? Have you tried several methods to combat these, yet all proved ineffective? Well, worry no more for you just found the right niche that’ll shun away your farming woes. Congratulations! You are about to start the journey towards achieving a high quality, disease-free banana. Welcome to the online course on Managing Common Diseases in Banana!”
I guess every school needs cheerleaders. Here’s a direct link (registration required) to the nine-part program, which is called “Managing Common Disease in Banana.”
To assist washed-out Ecuadorean banana farmers, fair-trade importer Oke is taking donations to buy a Bobcat earth-mover. It’s a worthy cause. Read about it here.
More on fair trade, Ecuador’s floods, and rising banana prices here, here, here, and especially here.
The “Fort Knox of Food.” From the International Herald Tribune.
The recent publicity about the opening of the “Global Seed Vault” in Longyearbyen, Norway, has prompted some questions about whether or not bananas are included. The vault is 500 meters deep, buried under a snow-capped mountain, and is filled with over a hundred million (!!!) different kinds seeds, all as a hedge against the predicted destruction to plant life global warming may be about to wreak. The project was described as a “backup hard drive” for agriculture by the New York Times (story). But bananas aren’t included. Why?
Simple: bananas don’t have seeds. And banana plantlets – the primary means of storing genetic material for the fruit – are an impossible fit for the Norwegian project, which can only store the so-called “orthodox” seeds – the kind that can be preserved dry. Storing bananas, as a recent press release from Bioversity International noted, need “human intervention. That’s always been the story with bananas. We brought them from the forest thousands of years ago, and we’ve carried them around the world. They aren’t just a product of human enterprise – they’re a companion to humanity.
Liquid nitrogen keeps the banana materials at minus 320 degrees fahrenheit (-196 degrees c.)
So, is there a banana bank account out there, working as a hedge against disaster? Yes – it is called the “Black Box” collection, stored at the French Research Institute for Development, in Montpellier, France. The tissue samples there duplicate of those stored at the International Transit Center at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium; that institution is one of the leading center for banana genetic research. “It’s a mirror of the need for crop diversity itself,” Emile Frison, Bioversity’s Director General, said. “Just as humanity needs different varieties of crops, so different crops need different kinds of long-term storage.”
That’s good news for bananas, which face many present-day external attackers – diseases and pests especially virulent to the fruit, which suffers from declining genetic diversity – that are as destructive as the doomsday scenarios contemplated by the ice mountain project.
(This story is based on a press release from Bioversity. Read it in its entirety here – it includes the story of how the Black Box works, and why bananas require unique storage techniques.)
“Cuando las Miradas no Alcanzan,” 47×47″, oil on canvas, 2005
“Unaited gui Stand,” 92 x 44 inches, oil on canvas, 2003*
Gonzalo is an artist from Colombia, site of some of the must brutal violence in the sad history of the Banana Republics. His grandfather worked for United Fruit (Chiquita), and tried – Gonzolo told me in an email – to paint a more sympathetic picture of the banana giant, which was responsible for the massacre of at least 1,000 banana workers during a strike in 1929 (the bloodshed was fictionalized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in “100 Years of Solitude.”
The conflict between differing versions of the story – and Gonzalo’s own soul-searching about the relationship between the fruit, his own life, his culture, and his family give his work a high level of intensity (which is enhanced by the size of his canvases – some bigger than eight feet across.) I love these paintings. The feel both documentary and impressionistic, all at once.
Researchers in New Zealand and Japan have engineered what they describe as a “tear-free” onion, according to a report from the AFP wire service. The happy onion was developed by the Crop and Food Research institute. The lead scientist on the project, Colin Eady, described how it was done:
“We previously thought the tearing agent was produced spontaneously by cutting onions, but [a Japanese research team] proved it was controlled by an enzyme,” he told AFP from his home outside Christchurch. “Here in New Zealand we had the ability to insert DNA into onions, using gene-silencing technology developed by Australian scientists. The technology creates a sequence that switches off the tear-inducing gene in the onion so it doesn’t produce the enzyme. So when you slice the vegetable, it doesn’t produce tears.”
Genetic modification isn’t all that scary if you really think about it. And though nothing may be more valuable than the ability to make tears cease to flow, for bananas – aside from developing one that’s friendlier to pedestrians – the mission is more conventional: strengthen the fruit so that it will grow better, resist disease, and reduce the use of harmful chemicals that damage the environment and the health of plantation workers.
My friend Tim lived in Costa Rica for almost five years. He confirms not just that our simian relatives eat bananas, but also how they eat them:
“As I remember, they ate them upside down. Used their teeth to pull apart the peel. Bigger monkeys would bite chunks off or/and the smaller monkeys would break off chunks with both hands and sit and nibble or chomp away at the prized package in their hands. Actually it would be cool to get a small video of this on your site. Err…dont mean to tell you what ot do, I just remember it being real cute to watch.”
Note: This entry originally appeared on the Penguin authors’ blog, which I contributed to this week.
If you’ve bought my book, then you know that the subject – saving the banana from a disease that currently threatens it – has, as its background, the notion of monoculture: relying on a single crop, rather than diverse ones, leaving that crop open to all-in-one-blow disasters.
One way to expand bananas beyond the modern monoculture would be to recognize that the fruit is usable for other products. One of the most intriguing of these is paper. The banana “tree” isn’t a tree at all – it is a giant herb. That means a lot of things (for example, a banana plant has no bark), but for the sake of making paper, the big advantage is this: a banana plant grows like crazy. A productive plantation can see tiny stems reach as high as twenty feet in a single year. Each “tree” produces one bunch – about 150 individual bananas – of fruit per year; it then gives “birth” to another tree. The process can continue virtually forever. The big question has been what to do with those giant trees, which quickly fall overonethey’ve fruited, and usually are discarded after they’ve been.
More after the jump; or watch this informative (but very dry) video about the banana paper manufacturing process.
THE BANANA BLOG is about the world's most endangered - and dangerous - fruit. THE BIG PARADE is about stairways, route and transit geekery, and pedestrian pursuits in Los Angeles. ASYMPTOTES is about writing and obsession. It is new, like an abandoned subdivision about to be invaded by zombies. You can also read all the topics at once.
