Banana

  Rowe’s lab was in La Lima, at the huge company compound where a community of American employees oversaw the thousands of Honduran workers who grew bananas across most of the country’s eastern lowlands. Over the next few decades, the facility would house the world’s most successful banana-breeding program (and one that remains in operation today).

  The first step in breeding bananas has always been to have good raw material. Because bananas are sterile and generally seedless (the Cavendish is absolutely seedless, which is why it cannot be bred by any conventional method), that means bananas of a kind that can be bred. Rowe began with a huge collection of wild and rare bananas gathered by O. A. Reinking, a legendary explorer of tropical fauna, who traveled through Indochina and the Malay Peninsula then island-hopped from the Philippines through Java, Bali, and New Guinea and all the way to Australia between 1921 and 1927. Reinking was one of the early contributors to a greater understanding of Panama disease, helping to pin down the structure of the fungus in 1933. His sample of fusarium, collected in the Philippines, is now housed in the U.S. National Fungus Collections of the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (yes, there is such a place).

  Reinking returned home with 134 different banana types: 81 that propagated nonsexually, the way cultivated bananas do; 26 that were clones of traditional plantains; and 27 wild, seeded bananas. The collection was initially housed at United Fruit’s Panama research labs, not in test tubes and petri dishes like today’s preserved bananas, but as living fruit grown in greenhouses. But the company’s half-hearted commitment to banana science, motivated by poor results and the land-grab alternative, led to the quick abandonment of the program. In 1930 the entire Reinking collection was moved to Wilson Popenoe’s Lancetilla gardens. (Reinking also collected citrus and spent much of his early career attempting to prove the existence of the Rumphius pummelo, initially described in the eighteenth century, which most experts considered to be mythical. He finally found the fruit, which is like a grapefruit with a second grapefruit growing inside, on the Banda Islands in Indonesia.)

  The Reinking bananas were mostly forgotten until the mid-1950s, when United Fruit belatedly, and half-heartedly, began searching for a replacement for the Gros Michel. Seventy-two of the samples were then transferred to La Lima, where Rowe was opening his research facility, forming the beginnings of a collection that is still the basis for most Honduran testing today.

  A banana breeder needs that kind of variety. It isn’t hard to find seeds in a wild banana: When the fruits—which are generally shaped like the bananas we eat, though sometimes less curved—are cut in cross section, they reveal as many as two dozen pea-sized, black pits. The seeds are the raw material, and researchers will usually set aside a separate section in a plantation to grow the fertile fruit. They’ll then be exposed to the same maladies that threaten bananas people eat. Those with desirable strengths are then grown in quantity. Visitors to an experimental plantation will see rows and rows of them, each marked with a species name and planting date.

  The serious manual labor begins in these rows. Since few of the experimental plants exhibit the necessary combination of traits from the start, they’re often bred with each other. In four decades of research, Rowe and his colleagues created nearly twenty thousand hybrids, or about four hundred times the number of edible varieties that emerged over seven thousand years of conventional human cultivation.

  Breeding such a banana is the agricultural version of an arranged marriage. At dawn, workers head into the fields, sometimes on bicycles, wearing utility belts that hold a dozen or more collecting containers (they resemble, appropriately, baby-food jars). They climb up ladders to gently scrape finely powdered pollen out of the nine-month-old male portion of the hermaphroditic plant’s flowers, which hangs upside-down at the top end of the bloom, and brush it into the jars. Later that morning, the collected pollen is placed into the stigma, the passageway to the plant’s ovary. (In nature this is done by insects, which aren’t choosy enough to conduct decent banana-breeding experiments.) Four months later, the new plant is harvested.

  At the Fundacion Hondureña de Investigación Agricola, or Honduran Agricultural Research Foundation (FHIA), La Lima’s publicly funded successor to Phil Rowe’s United Fruit research station (and the first place I visited when researching this book), Juan Fernando Aguilar, the facility’s current director, led me through the fields as we followed the bike-riding pollenators.

  This is an experimental plantation, where the fruit grows unprotected, undefended. There is no aerial spraying, no careful bagging to keep fruit unblemished and healthy. Instead, the test plantation invites all comers: beetles, bugs, and burrowing worms; viruses, fungi, and bacteria. The field is a ragtag layout with fruit of different sizes and colors, trees of varying heights, and plants with vastly contrasting levels of healthiness.

  We walked over to a large work area, shaded by a tinted, corrugated plastic roof.

  “We harvest about one thousand bunches each week,” Aguilar told me, as he lit a cigarette and stared down at his white shirt, which was clean when we’d met earlier that day but now had a huge blot of banana sap—unremovable and rubbery, the dark tops of the bananas we peel are made of the same substance—splattered on it. “That’s the true banana researcher’s logo,” he shrugged.

  The harvested bananas are first arranged by “cross” (the two parent types) and then by the desired attribute the breeders are hoping for. (So, if a hypothetical Lucy banana is bred with an equally fanciful Ricky fruit, all are put together into one section. They are then further separated according to the various goals of the hybridization: thick skin, resistance to disease, or a specific taste. Generally, a new banana is bred with one attribute in mind; it is then merged with a separate man-made fruit that possesses one of the other desired qualities. The results are then crossed and crossed again until, in theory, the banana that has everything emerges.) Next, the fruit is stored in a ripening room for several days—the room contains a precise mixture of ethylene and carbon dioxide gasses—and then taken into a larger work area to be peeled.

  Ordinarily, the only thing a person peeling a banana needs to worry about is where the peel goes. Avoiding a slapstick tumble is not the issue in banana breeding. Instead, the primary objective is finesse. Every single banana from the week’s harvest—that can be up to 100,000 bananas—is carefully skinned then segregated (sometimes in separate containers, other times by working on different types at different times) so that one breed doesn’t mix with another. The peeling at FHIA is done by women, paid ten dollars a day, about double the typical Honduran wage. Aguilar says they are better at precision work than men. “They handle the fruit more gently,” he told me. “And they have better handwriting.” Each separate bunch has to be identified and logged, so that its success or failure can be tracked through the entire growing cycle. (The peels are usually composted and fed to pigs.)

  The men return in the next step. The logged bunches are transferred to their own barrels, where they’re fermented. (The process produces a vinegary smell that’s partially sweet, partially overripe. The aroma is a bit sickening—and very much like that of Ugandan banana wine.) The now-oozing bananas are lifted by workers in protective gear—smocks and rubber boots—and poured into an oversized sieve, where they’re crushed into a pulp by a heavy, steel mallet with an eight-foot-long handle. The smashing has two primary byproducts: the impossible-to-clean stickum and a gooey banana concentrate. The adhesive waste is discarded, while the fruity muck is transferred to smaller mesh seives—each about the size of a sheet of standard typing paper—where women carefully wash the mixture. The goal is to find a tiny speck of fertility amidst tons of traditional banana barrenness. Aguilar showed me a table with a container that held about two dozen seeds. Since, for the most part, seeded bananas are being crossed with seedless ones, and since seediness is one of the attributes being bred out of the bananas, the seed yield is maddeningly low. “Those seeds there,” Agui
lar said, “came from about a quarter million bananas.” That makes the odds of finding a seed ten thousand to one.

  That was the end of the process for the banana breeders up until the 1970s. They’d replant the found seeds, crossing and crossing again until, with luck, a viable commercial fruit was developed. Though a few bred bananas made it to larger plantations, for the most part, the first four decades of banana breeding yielded a success rate of approximately…zero.

  Building a banana: the men pollinate…

  …and the women handle the delicate seeds.

  Rowe helped develop an additional step called “embryo rescue.”

  In this case, the seed is not the end of the human-assisted banana reproductive process. Every viable seed, when cut open, contains a tiny embryo about one-fiftieth the size of the seed itself. In Honduras I watched as technicians, using Rowe’s technique, peered into microscopes and carefully removed the embryos, dropping them into test tubes containing a fertilized growing medium.

  Aguilar took me into a brightly lit room and asked me to remove my shoes. “This is a nursery,” he said. “No contamination.” The space contained row after row of test tubes, with tiny banana plants in various stages of early growth: some just a few filaments snaking down into the liquid, others with fingernail-sized green leaves.

  Aguilar narrowed the odds for me again. “Most of these,” he said, “will either not grow at all—or they won’t grow right.” The plants that do will eventually be taken out to a greenhouse and then, when they’re big enough, be planted outside. The percentage of plants that make it to the field? Here’s the math: one seed for every ten thousand bananas. One percent of those seeds actually produce an embryo that’s viable. And the total odds of getting a banana to the greenhouse? One million to one.

  It isn’t over then. That lottery long-shot banana still has work to do: Once that plant is fully grown, it is thrown back into the unprotected field. If it survives, if a needed quality appears, the process repeats, generation after generation, over a period of years, with each new banana begetting another. Many of the varieties Rowe began breeding in the 1960s are still being examined, still being perfected.

  Almost fifty years have passed since the time Rowe began the program that is today run by Aguilar. During that time, La Lima’s researchers have come up with between twenty and twenty-five viable banana varieties. Some of those are being grown—they’re suitable for limited, local consumption—in Cuba, Brazil, and parts of Africa. That’s a huge success story, given the odds.

  But how many of Rowe’s progeny got close enough to be considered as a Cavendish replacement?

  Just one.

  Phil Rowe’s legacy: man-made bananas,

  bred over four decades in Honduras.

  CHAPTER 29

  A Savior?

  UNITED FRUIT LAUNCHED THE ATTACK on Jacobo Arbenz from Honduras in 1954. But that country was at the same time embroiled in its own banana conflict. A month after the soon-to-be-deposed Guatemalan leader presented United Fruit with a tax bill, a few dozen Honduran workers walked off the job. By the end of the month, the nation’s entire banana industry was frozen in place: Thirty thousand workers refused to enter the plantations, loading docks, and railroad depots.

  The Honduran economy—never strong—was on the verge of collapse, and the banana exporters, already in a state of panic over Guatemala, were terrified that the strikers would succeed and that one Central American country after another would then fall. To lose control over their holdings as Panama disease was reaching its coup de grâce was unthinkable.

  United Fruit acted first in Guatemala because it was easier to stage an overthrow in a country without strikers than to attack tens of thousands of angry, idled laborers. But the company also knew that success against Arbenz would shift momentum away from the envisioned chain reaction. That’s exactly what happened. When the Guatemalan government folded, the morale of the Honduran strikers collapsed, and the country’s government was able to arrest labor leaders by accusing them of having ties to Arbenz. The biggest banana strike in history ended four days after the Guatemalan president went into exile.

  YET VICTORY TURNED OUT to be a difficult thing to claim—and to hold on to. Honduran workers had accomplished something just by generating such a large number of strikers. That tiny margin of success would resurface a few years later in an even more powerful attempt by banana workers to gain control over their own destinies.

  Between 1954 and 1958, Honduras—which since the turn of the century had teetered in what seemed to be a permanent state of instability thanks to constant intervention by banana interests—had one president who never took office; a vice president who became president then quickly attempted to extend his rule into dictatorship; and two military coups, one that failed and one that finally succeeded in 1956. The Honduran army would control the country for decades; the effect on the nation’s citizenry, economy, and industries would be to veer between extremes, depending on what particular faction ruled. Honduras would have good times and terrible times, looking sometimes like a sleepy, impoverished republic and other times like a police state. The components of the banana industry’s power would change—the way land and workers were used—but those alterations came mostly as tactical responses to maintain the status quo. (Even today, bananas remain Honduras’s largest industry, with Chiquita and Dole accounting for nearly 100 percent of the fruit that leaves the loading docks on the country’s northeast edge each day.)

  In retrospect, the first years following the 1956 coup seem almost like a golden age. The ruling junta allowed elections: The winner was Ramón Villeda Morales. Villeda Morales had also won the 1954 vote, but he’d been denied office, partly because he’d been seen as too left wing. The Honduran was far less radical than his Guatemalan counterpart, but like Arbenz, Villeda Morales—who’d worked as a rural doctor before going into politics—understood the injustices that Honduran peasants had been subjected to for decades. And like the failed Guatemalan, the new Honduran president understood that the key to change was land reform.

  THE HONDURAN PROGRAM was strategically modest compared to what Guatemala had attempted. Small plantations and communities were allowed to form rural cooperatives and labor laws were reformed to allow social security and increased protection for workers. The softer approach didn’t result in an immediate disaster, but, by 1963, when it appeared Villeda Morales would be reelected by a large margin, and anticipating even more sweeping reforms, the country’s military stepped in again: Elections were canceled, Villeda Morales was exiled, and Colonel Oswaldo López Arellano took power. Many of the earlier land reforms were rolled back, and even the United States—which was beginning to feel uneasy about intervening for the banana companies—officially suspended diplomatic relations with Honduras following the coup. The country’s new leader purged perceived leftists, especially those with ties to Cuba’s Fidel Castro (this pleased the United States, which restored diplomatic relations, with increased military assistance, a year later).

  For those laboring on Honduran plantations, the coup marked the beginning of decades where gains were lost, gained, and lost again. Some unions were banned and others grew. Land was transferred to workers then taken away. The one taboo was strikes: As recently as 1991, the military was killing workers who walked off the job.

  Where were the banana companies? They were still exerting influence, though more often by stealth than through armed force. And they were still hungry for land, still determined to do things their way, opposing every attempt to provide workers with basic benefits. In 1972 a new form of Sigatoka hit Honduras. In a foretelling of today’s Panama disease crisis, the new version of the old malady was more virulent. The related diseases are distinguished by the color they turn banana leaves: yellow for the older malady and black for the modern version.

  To combat Black Sigatoka, which remains the most widespread banana disease in the world, aerial spraying of the crop was increased, resulting in further damage
to the health of workers on the ground. United Fruit needed to gain market share in order to cover the increased expense of fighting the new disease, so it embarked on a price war with Fyffes (the former subsidiary) that ultimately led to the British rival’s departure from the country, along with accusations that Chiquita had hired agents to destroy competing banana shipments. In other words, though the actors, techniques, and storyline shifted constantly, Honduras remained the quintessential banana republic.

  ELI BLACK WANTED TO CHANGE THAT. Looking at his balance sheets, the entrepreneur who’d made his fortune as a Wall Street takeover king seemed an unlikely reformer. Like Sam Zemurray, Black was a Jewish immigrant who’d arrived in the United States poor, and with a different name, coming from Poland in the mid-1920s as Elihu Menashe Blachowitz. (Black only changed his name as an adult, after he’d entered Columbia Business School.) Black was as ambitious as Zemurray, as well. At age thirty-two, after a successful stint as an investment banker, Black picked a long-shot, troubled company—American Seal-Kap, which manufactured paper cups and drinking straws—and restored it to health; he flipped the profits into a takeover of a meat-packing concern.

  Black’s next target was United Fruit. The late 1960s were a time when many small U.S. companies merged into huge conglomerates. In 1967 pineapple importer Castle & Cooke bought Standard Fruit, eventually leading to the use of its Dole brand name for its bananas (sales of the traditionally Hawaiian fruit are now dwarfed by bananas, which are Dole’s largest product). Today’s third-largest banana importer, Del Monte, which was then a maker of canned fruits and vegetables, entered the business by purchasing the West Indies Fruit Company, which mostly operated in the Caribbean. Over the next two years, United Fruit would become the target of a heated takeover battle. Black’s rival was a company called Zapata, which had begun in Texas oil exploration. The owner was the first President George Bush. (Once again, we enter the banana labyrinth: Bush’s company was formed in 1953; some of its drilling was on islands on the Gulf of Mexico. These islands were allegedly used as staging areas for U.S.-backed activities against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, starting in the late 1950s and continuing through the early 1960s. One of those actions was code-named Operation Zapata. Though the Bush connection has never been confirmed, when the planned operation did go through, two of the boats reportedly used were named Barbara (Bush’s wife) and Houston, the future president’s adopted hometown. Some of the other vessels used in the failed 1961 operation, which became known as the Bay of Pigs invasion after the public learned about it, were owned by United Fruit, on loan from the Great White Fleet. The banana giant’s motive, allegedly, was anger over Castro’s takeover of the island’s banana plantations.)