Banana

by Dan Koeppel

  The banana industry did fund some research. Scientists backed by United Fruit determined that Panama disease was probably spread via water, running through the banana’s root systems. They identified the malady as a fungus in the fusarium family. When breeders created IC2, the second human-bred banana resistant to the blight, by crossing Gros Michel with a wild Asian species, banana companies agreed to grow it in Honduras. But the fruit lost resistance before it was able to be put into large-scale production.

  The problem was that the programs banana scientists came up with were largely ignored by growers working for the same companies. Even if a new banana couldn’t be found, even if the disease couldn’t be cured, plantation managers could adopt practices that would extend the life of existing growing areas and slow the malady’s advance. They could quarantine infected areas and make sure that workers, trains, vehicles, and tools were cleaned and sanitized so they’d be prevented from spreading contaminated soil. For the most part, they didn’t do any of this.

  Wardlaw also was one of the first to see that banana growing was throwing the entire Central American ecosystem out of balance. “Virgin forest,” he wrote, “is the raw material of the agricultural pioneer. Before it can be exploited to advantage, its value must be truly assessed, otherwise the exploiter may find himself bankrupt while posterity is left with an infinitely poorer heritage.” Wardlaw believed that Panama disease was the product of willful disregard of the laws of nature. Bananas were growing in a place where they never belonged, and—like many biologic newcomers—came under attack from pathogens they couldn’t resist.

  Banana growers did find havens where the Gros Michel seemed to be the stronger force. For years, the Santa Marta district of Colombia—a focal point of the 1929 strike—remained free of the blight even as surrounding areas succumbed. The region became a key source of the clean, disease-free plants needed to jump-start new plantations. Why Santa Marta was resistant wasn’t clear—it might have had something to do with climate or soil conditions—but in 1948 the disease arrived there, and the plantations quickly succumbed.

  In the 1950s, Wardlaw and his colleagues reprised the 1931 survey. By then the blight had gone global. Eight nations in Asia were infected, five in the Pacific, twelve in Africa, and twenty-two in the Americas, including the entire Caribbean. Even the United States was struck. A few nascent—and probably ill-fated, with or without a fungal attacker—plantations were hit in Florida, and promptly shuttered. In every case, the failure of the banana companies to enforce proper quarantine and isolation practices hastened the spread of the disease.

  The banana moguls knew what Panama disease was. They knew what it did. They knew how it spread. But they refused to use any of this knowledge for positive change. It was as if the power of the banana, which had changed both the nations that consumed it and those that grew it, had addicted United Fruit and its rivals to just one method of growth: blunt marauding through the tropics without considering the consequences of, or alternatives to, standard procedure. Now that nature had answered back, the banana companies seemed deaf and baffled.

  CHAPTER 19

  Pure Science

  WILSON POPENOE WAS DETERMINED that his voice not be ignored. He’d become obsessed with plants as a boy, while working in his father’s greenhouse near Pasadena, California. By the time he was twenty, he was an agricultural prodigy, with an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly every fruit and vegetable grown in the United States and an intense desire that his understanding should encompass the entire world. When Cornell University offered him a full scholarship, Popenoe turned it down, deciding instead to travel the Americas and Asia for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he was given a title never before bestowed on anyone: plant developer. The self-taught scientist literally changed landscapes wherever he went. In 1913 he helped establish orange crops in Brazil. In Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, and Guatemala, he planted coconuts, olives, figs, and Thai rambutan. In 1923 he married archaeologist Dorothy Hughes, and the two continued to travel—with Dorothy providing pen-and-ink drawings to accompany Wilson’s photographs and written reports.

  The couple’s wanderings made them especially aware of the desperate conditions plantation and farm workers faced across the world. In one of his reports, Wilson Popenoe noted the mistreatment of black laborers on South African farms. When Dorothy Popenoe took a solo trip to Panama, she attempted to take a picture of a local woman kneeling by a stream but was rebuffed. “She didn’t like Americans,” she wrote in a letter to Wilson. “I was reminded of your tale of the Guatemalan Indian, who wanted nothing but to be left alone.” Instead, the “Indians” of Central America were picking bananas.

  In 1925 Popenoe was hired by United Fruit to open a research station in Lancetilla, a few miles from the company’s Honduran headquarters in Tela. It was a curious job for someone who’d expressed so much sympathy for the exploited, but the scientist was determined that his work could aid people working at both the highest and lowest levels of the banana industry. His primary assignment wasn’t to breed a resistant banana, it was to collect them, gathering samples of both wild and local fruit from around the world, and return them to Honduras for experimentation. As a hedge, the self-made plant expert was charged with a secondary task: determining what crops might be grown on land ruined by Panama disease—or even in the entire region, if bananas completely vanished. His proposed replacement crops included rubber, a dozen kinds of timber, the oil palm, and cocoa, all of which are now grown across wide stretches of Central America.

  Some of Popenoe’s projects benefited United Fruit at the highest—and most personal—levels. When Sam Zemurray wanted to curry favor with Honduran president Tiburcio Carías Andino, he ordered Popenoe to develop a local breed of tobacco that could compete with product from Cuba. Whether Popenoe succeeded is still debated, but what is certain today is that any American connoisseur who wants to stay within the law is indebted to Popenoe: The Honduran product is as close as one can get to a Havana stogie. Popenoe also collected poisonous snakes—but not for fun. He knew that snakebites were common, especially among banana workers, and developed one of the world’s largest collections of antivenin.

  Popenoe left multiple legacies. The descendants of the fruit from his banana collection are still used as basic stock in the attempt to create resistant breeds. And North Americans owe Popenoe a debt every time we scoop up a chip with guacamole. He planted the first successful avocado crops in the hemisphere (though they remained largely an expensive import until after World War II, when California finally caught up. Even then, said a 1950 report by the state’s Avocado Society, growers remained “dependent on Wilson Popenoe”). Popenoe made huge strides in advancing native control of Latin America’s agricultural destiny. The scientist managed to convince United Fruit to donate $3 million in order to found the Pan-American School of Agriculture (and even more amazingly, he got the fruit company to agree not to hire the institution’s graduates, ensuring that the locally trained plant experts would serve public, rather than corporate, interests).

  The final thing Popenoe left behind is the most problematic. The botanic gardens he planted at Lancetilla are still open today. One of the more pleasant ways to get to them is to rent a bike in Tela and pedal to the facility along dirt roads, through deeply shaded bamboo forest. Guest cabins can be rented there, and though they aren’t air conditioned, a visitor can cool off with a quick dip into the Lancetilla River. The gardens are gorgeous and quiet. They’re Popenoe’s most lovely creation, and it is hard to imagine that anything malicious—even if it was not intended to be so—could have been created there.

  In many ways, Popenoe was a pure scientist. As sympathetic as he was to native causes, his job was to solve problems. Sometimes that meant not being able to see that immediate success might do long-term harm. The oil palm is a good example of that. Though it initially helped revitalize land left fallow by Panama disease, it has now become so widespread in Central America that it is responsible for much
of the region’s deforestation. For bananas, Popenoe helped create an even more controversial legacy: It is called Bordeaux mixture.

  CHAPTER 20

  A Second Front

  IT WASN’T JUST THAT Panama disease was so virulent that any attempt to control it seemed futile. Banana growers were soon finding other things to worry about. In 1935 a new banana-killing pathogen appeared. In many ways, Sigatoka, which was first described in Fiji (the disease is named after a river on that South Pacific island), was even more insidious than the better-known fungus that had been spreading across Latin America for over three decades. Though it killed plants outright, just as Panama disease did, it could also—if fruit was harvested at the earliest, invisible stages of infection—strike while the fruit was in transport. Bananas loaded unblemished would arrive at market in various states of rot, ranging from mild softness to massive discoloration, along with a foul taste and odor. Even worse, Sigatoka was not spread on shoes and tools or in soil and water.

  The pathogen was airborne. That meant it moved at a pace much quicker than Panama disease. From a single Honduran plantation, Sigatoka expanded through the region’s entire banana crop—vulnerable, as always, because each fruit was a clone of the other—with astonishing rapidity. The banana industry had recently begun to open huge operations in the virgin, Panama disease–free soil along the canal nation’s Pacific coast. The project went well, and several years later the earlier infection had yet to arrive. But when Sigatoka appeared, the entire region was wiped out in a matter of weeks.

  But faster and more toxic as it was, Sigatoka was different from Panama disease in one critical respect: United Fruit was able to find a cure. Copper sulfate—you might have used it in a high school science experiment, growing blue crystals from the substance in a baby-food jar—was quickly found to stop the new malady in the lab. The technical problem was how to apply it to the banana fields. Ordinary crop-dusting didn’t provide enough coverage. Instead, the company—in a research effort led by Wilson Popenoe—was able to modify a formula used by French winemakers, mixing the powerful chemical with lime and oil so it could be turned into a fine spray. Even then, applying it was a huge technological challenge, but it was the kind of task United Fruit had always been good at.

  The substance known as Bordeaux mixture led to a chemical re-taking of the tropics. “To deliver the necessary enormous quantities—250 gallons per acre, twenty to thirty times a year—United Fruit created a fungicide infrastructure of phaeronic scale,” wrote Steve Marquardt in a 2002 issue of the Latin American Research Review. The company had to install miles and miles of piping, thousands of pumps, and reel after reel of firehoses and nozzles. A quarter of United Fruit’s workers were pulled from picking and packing, and turned into pesticide sprayers. “Fields,” Marquardt notes, “turned into factories.” Pesticides have been used for thousands of centuries, but United Fruit’s industrialization of the process was the final part of an infamous trio of “innovations” that, in less than two decades, transformed the way people controlled—and reacted to—agricultural maladies. Aerial spraying was invented in 1922. It was followed, ten years later, by the first crop experiments with DDT. The use of Bordeaux mixture became widespread in the years just prior to World War II.

  THE CAMPAIGN TO CONTROL SIGATOKA had an unexpected fringe benefit for the banana company: Such an effort was too expensive to be mounted by small plantation owners. The disease, and the “cure,” helped United Fruit squeeze most of its last few remaining competitors out of business, leaving the Central American banana market to itself and the much-smaller (and untouchable, thanks to antitrust laws) Standard Fruit.

  The bananas benefited. The banana growers benefited. American consumers benefited. The only people in the fruit’s supply chain to be harmed by the disease were the banana workers themselves. Already burdened by near-indentured status, with substandard housing, poor medical care, and no ability to organize, they now faced a much more insidious threat: Bordeaux mixture made them sick. Workers would return from the field with their skin literally turned blue by the heavy spraying (a nickname for a Bordeaux mixture–stained bananero was perico, or “parakeet”; they were as brightly colored as the common tropical bird). No longer was the biggest immediate health risk faced by banana workers an industrial accident—a wound from a machete or a mishap on a loading dock. After a few months of exposure, workers could no longer scrub the blue tint from their flesh. They’d lose their sense of smell and their ability to hold down food.

  Then they died.

  “Pervasive fear of the respiratory effects of Bordeaux inhalation fostered an enduring trope in Central American anti–United Fruit literature and journalism: the skeletal, tubercular former perico, dying alone in an urban slum or on the fringes of the plantation zone,” Marquardt writes. It was, he notes, a “macabre exchange”: human lives traded for bananas. The misery was hardly abated by the fact that United Fruit paid the workers applying the fungicide much more than an ordinary banana worker would earn. Many poor workers took up the offer—with fatal consequences.

  THE FIGHT AGAINST PANAMA DISEASE wasn’t going nearly as well. Convinced that irrigation was the key to sweeping the fusarium fungus out of the fields, United Fruit engineers began constructing extensive hydraulic systems—moats and dams, canals and levees—powered by gigantic pumps.

  There was great optimism about these efforts, and, combined with the Sigatoka spraying apparatus, it seemed that the war against the jungle had finally, permanently been won. A company newsletter, Marquardt notes, boasted that control had at last been asserted over “creeping, progress-consuming, tropical Mother Nature.”

  Once again, the company’s most powerful enemy punished that overconfidence. Irrigation did provide a brief respite from Panama disease—then it boomeranged. Water spread the fungus. By 1950 Panama disease was moving faster than ever before. (An inconvenient truth, if there ever was one.) Even so, company managers continued to cling to their miracle cure. The failures, they believed, were only because not enough water was being applied.

  What began as drenching became torrential. The technique was called “flood fallowing.” It was nothing less than creating huge, artificial lakes—building earthen sluices around entire plantations and filling them three feet deep in an attempt to swamp the fungus. It was expensive, scarring to the land, and more than ineffective: All that water did kill large amounts of the Panama disease fungus, but it also destroyed almost everything else—including other fungi and bacteria—along with it. The scrubbed, drained fields would then provide a clean, competition-free vacuum for any malady strong enough to colonize quickly.

  Panama disease fit the bill.

  Whether victorious—as in the conquest of Sigatoka—or vanquished, the banana industry’s attitudes seemed unchanged. From Minor Keith’s conquest of the Panamanian jungles, through the overthrow of Honduras just before the First World War, to the harsh lesson taught to Colombia’s workers in 1929, the Octopus knew only one way to wield power: bluntly, with brute force. Soon—once again at the behest of Sam Zemurray, the rough-and-tumble self-made billionaire who sat at the center of the business during its most turbulent and aggressive years—the banana industry would embark on its most complex, angry, and ultimately futile application of that philosophy.

  CHAPTER 21

  No Respite

  TO CALL THE SS SIXAOLA a banana boat is like calling the Grand Canyon a big ditch. Built in 1911, less than forty years after Lorenzo Dow Baker brought his first shipment of fruit from Jamaica aboard a ship powered by sails, the vessel was enormous: It was half as large as the Titanic, capable of holding five hundred railroad cars full of bananas. The Sixaola wasn’t the only ship in the Great White Fleet that indicated how huge the public’s appetite for bananas had become. Bigger vessels were being constructed at shipyards across America. Even the smallest of United Fruit’s ships could carry thousands of times more fruit than Baker had.

  But the Sixaola was United Fruit’s sea
faring pride. The vessel was named after a Panamanian river that emptied into Bocas del Toro, the natural harbor that was United Fruit’s primary shipping point for much of the early twentieth century. For nearly thirty years following its launch, it had mostly plied the same route: from Panama to New Orleans, a journey of just a few days, through seas that were—except during hurricane season—nearly always calm.

  All that changed in 1942.

  When World War II broke out, American banana consumption was at an all-time high. It had grown every year since 1900. Desire for the fruit became even stronger in the 1930s: Unemployed workers might have sold apples in the street, but they still preferred to eat the cheaper banana. United Fruit had weathered the depression nearly unblemished. Under Sam Zemurray, the company gained nearly full control of the global market for bananas, even as the amount of work it had to do to evade Panama disease increased. When one plantation failed, another was built, a task that meant forging an entire settlement from scratch. Land needed to be cleared, railroad lines and telegraph lines needed to be extended. Housing, schools, and hospitals for workers had to be built, and infrastructure, including cattle ranches to breed livestock for food and donkeys for banana-field transport, sawmills and machine shops, water transport systems and power-generating stations all needed to be put into place. Executive perks were also carried over—sometimes literally, with structures disassembled, transported, and rebuilt so that each plantation had the golf courses, churches, restaurants, and, for single executives, brothels, often filled with underage girls, needed to create lifestyles most of the officials could neither have afforded nor gotten away with at home. United Fruit’s minicolonies were a huge incentive when it came to bringing skilled managers to the otherwise less-than-comfortable-for-gringos tropics. They were also planning centers for some of the company’s most terrible actions. When I sat with a former company executive in the dining room of what was the banana giant’s country club outside San Pedro Sula, Honduras, he told me how he’d grown up—his father also worked for the company—in a United Fruit compound and how, at these very tables, “governments were made and broken in between rounds of golf.”