Banana

by Dan Koeppel

  Black won the battle for the banana giant with spectacular fireworks: On September 25, 1969, he bought 733,000 shares of United Fruit in a single day—at the time, the third-largest deal in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. A year later, a weakened United Fruit merged entirely with Black’s company; the company that was originally named as a result of the merger between Andrew Preston’s import concern and Minor Keith’s railroad network was rechristened United Brands.

  Black was known as a take-no-prisoners businessman, and his battle with Zapata proved that. But Black was also deeply religious, coming from a long line of Hebrew scholars. Prior to entering the world of finance, he spent three years as a rabbi. Even during his career as a corporate raider, much of the money he earned went to support Jewish philanthropies. He was a member of six different temples and usually spent Saturdays discussing religion with his closest friend, Rabbi Jonathan Levine. It was that background that led Black to feel deeply disturbed about the reputation of the banana company he’d taken over, which he’d almost certainly known about prior to his effort. Changing the company might even have been one of Black’s motivations in buying the banana giant: An article in Newsweek described the executive as “determined to end United Brands’ image as a Yankee exploiter of poor people.”

  Yet, before he could transform United Brands’ personality, Black first had to address a more practical matter—profits. In 1971 the company lost $2 million. Black cut budgets, but the next year, the loss was ten times greater. A Federal antitrust suit forced the company to sell more of its Guatemalan holdings, accounting for about 9 million bunches annually, to Del Monte. Deeply in debt, Black sold additional land in Costa Rica. (The sales set the stage for the structure of the banana industry today, with few plantations actually owned by the fruit companies. Instead, the facilities are owned by local interests, who sell bananas to Chiquita, Dole, and other banana exporters under contract. This has allowed the big banana conglomerates to pick and choose suppliers multinationally, based on who offers the lowest price for their fruit. The arrangement is a softened version of the squeeze technique United Fruit used earlier to pressure client countries that threatened to institute land and labor reforms.)

  The next years saw mixed results—and Black under increasing pressure. United Brands earned praise for its efforts in helping Nicaragua recover from a devastating 1972 earthquake; company money was largely responsible for rebuilding the country’s capital, Managua. The same year, the spread of Sigatoka increased across the region. The company’s response was to use more, and increasingly toxic, chemical sprays. The health of banana workers declined again. The company was profitable in 1973, earning $16 million, but it also suffered an unthinkable embarrassment: It was overtaken by Dole as the number one banana seller in the United States. Even so, Black announced that the company’s assets were finally in order and that the following year would see a return to big profits and market leadership.

  But 1974 turned out to be a tragic year for Eli Black and United Brands, whose products now included not just bananas but also sausages and sunglasses. For the first time, Central American governments banded together, announcing—in Costa Rica, Panama, and Honduras—a dollar-per-box tax on exported fruit. During the summer, Panamanian banana workers went on strike, leading to the formation of the Organization of Banana Exporting Countries, modeled after OPEC, the Middle Eastern oil-producing alliance that had successfully used a boycott and market pressures to raise gas prices—and precipitate an energy crisis—in the United States the year before. The move hurt the banana company, but were ultimately ineffective because Ecuador, now the world’s largest banana-producing nation, refused to join. Nature also seemed to be against the Central American alliance. A day after the organization was founded, a hurricane hit Honduras, destroying three-fourths of that country’s banana crop. Once again, Black put company assets into rebuilding Honduras. By the end of the year, the company was on the way to losses nearly three times 1972’s record. Black was forced to sell one of the company’s few profitable divisions, the Foster Grant eyewear company.

  Eli Black was a quiet, almost somber person, not given to revealing his feelings (a former teacher described Black to the New York Times as “a boy who always smiled—but never laughed”). Black also hated defeat. Yet the sixteen-hour days he’d been putting in at United Brands’ New York headquarters had failed to yield success; instead, they created grumblings on the part of company executives, shareholders, and banks that Black was better as a dealmaker than a day-to-day manager.

  On Saturday, February 1, 1975, Black began a typical weekend with his son. The two visited the barber and watched a movie. The next day, Black had Sunday brunch with his family in his Westport, Connecticut, home. Black then drove into Manhattan, where he spent the night at his Park Avenue apartment. Early Monday morning, Black was picked up by his chauffeur-driven company car. It took a little more than five minutes for the executive to arrive at his office, in the Pan Am Building, the fifty-eight-story office tower that rises above Grand Central Station (today, known as the MetLife Building). Black took the elevator to his small office on the forty-fourth floor, arriving there just before 8:00 a.m. The entrepreneur stepped inside, closed the door, and opened the window blinds. He lifted his heavy briefcase. “Then,” wrote the New York Times, “the man who never raised his voice swung his attaché case against a quarter-inch thick piece of glass.” The window shattered. One final detail: Black meticulously picked up the shards that remained in the window, as if he were neatening the opening he created.

  Then, still clutching his briefcase, the man who controlled the world’s largest banana empire jumped.

  “Mr. Black,” the Times report continued, “in a blue suit, hurtled down to the northbound Park Avenue ramp, falling on the roadway before horrified motorists.”

  While Black’s body lay in the street, the papers from his briefcase began to blow across the intersection. Neither among them, nor in his office above, was any suicide note.

  Eli Black’s funeral was attended by over five hundred people; the president of Yeshiva University gave the eulogy. The U.S. senator from Connecticut attended. The overriding emotion was not just sadness: The mourners were bewildered. Yes, things had been bad. But the sunglass division sale, announced the day following Black’s death, would have evened the company’s balance sheet. Surely, as a successful businessman, Black knew that his situation would eventually turn around. Even the rabbi officiating at the ceremony—he’d flown all the way from Jerusalem to honor Black—closed his remarks with an unanswered question: “How many persons,” he asked, “pushed Eli to a desperate option—how many contributed to his untimely tragedy—and who called on Eli to choose the wrong door?”

  The mystery lasted ten weeks.

  The police quickly ruled Black’s death a suicide. The only investigation remaining to be made was by the Securities and Exchange Commission, a routine inquiry always performed after such events. Black was working hard to squeeze every dollar out of United Brands. What he’d done was absolutely consistent with the company’s history—in fact, it seemed comparatively minor—but it was absolutely contradictory to Black’s values: In order to reduce the company’s tax liabilities in Honduras, Black had personally authorized a $1.25 million bribe to Oswaldo López Arellano. The bribe had the intended effect—the tax on bananas was reduced to a quarter per box. But it must have had a huge effect on Black. News of the bribe would have been humiliating; it would certainly have led to his resignation—and possibly prosecution.

  The answer to Eli Black’s suicide may lie in the friction between two poles: the checkered history of United Fruit, which Black had vowed to atone for, and the ethos most important in Black’s life—not business, but faith, as exemplified by the Torah, the holiest Hebrew text, and one that Black, as a rabbi and scholar, had studied his entire life.

  The passage that likely tore Black apart is found in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy, one of the Bible’s openi
ng chapters, imported directly from the earlier Jewish text. The words, spoken by Moses, come from God himself, brought to the wandering Israelites from Mount Sinai. This is the same part of the Bible that contains the Ten Commandments and God’s promise to reserve Israel as the Jewish homeland. The pronouncements of Moses also contain the mitzvah, Hebrew for “commands,” strict rules for living a moral and just life. To pay secret tribute for special favor is considered a dual sin: “Bribery,” says chapter 16, verse 19, “blinds the eyes of the wise, and perverts the words of the just.”

  The SEC investigation ultimately found that Black had surreptitiously funneled money to Honduran officials. For this, a penalty of $14,000 was imposed.

  CHAPTER 30

  Golden Child

  SINCE 1958 Phil Rowe had slowly, painstakingly been concocting better bananas. In a series of photos—Rowe took snapshots of his progeny, and often displayed them with full parental pride—we see one breed improving year by year. A wild bunch photographed in 1959 has just a few bananas on it, stubby and inedible. By 1969 the fruit, cooking bananas in this case, is robust, with a full-sized, appealing bunch made up of over a hundred individual fingers. The bunches depicted are 2,000 iterations from their original ancestor. By 1979, about 3,500 steps from the start, the bunches are even larger and have yielded several distinct varieties. But despite these successes, the 1970s were a time of decline for banana breeders. Eli Black’s cost-cutting measures eliminated much of the funding for the La Lima laboratories. Company managers had concluded there was little need for a better commercial banana after all: Panama disease appeared to be gone, and Sigatoka was controllable with chemicals (which consumers were unaware of and unaffected by, since the fruit, protected by thick skin, carries only trace amounts of residue, and what little remains washes off in processing).

  Rowe turned his work toward plantains. But United Brands needed the starchy green bananas far less than it did sweet yellow ones. Every banana dollar the company earned came from the Cavendish. Even when Rowe did concentrate on developing a dessert-type fruit, results were relatively poor since such a fruit needed a wider variety of qualities to be considered acceptable. There was another issue: During that era, the ability of U.S. breeders to patent plants was limited and poorly enforced. Exclusivity was restricted to just seventeen years, and in practice the rules—even if infringement could be detected, which was often an impossible task—didn’t necessarily apply internationally. (Today, because much breeding is done on a molecular level by biotechnology countries, the rules on plant patenting have become even more confused; efforts to “correct” the situation have generally not succeeded in making sure that the interests of people who grow food for subsistence are preserved along with the corporate right to market exclusively developed products.) Why would Chiquita develop a better banana, wrote former company researcher Ivan Buddenhagen, who was working with Rowe at the time, “when any new cultivar would be stolen and used by others? Why subsidize anyone else?”

  Rowe continued his work. But increasingly, he seemed to be falling behind. New breeders, mostly funded by European institutions and philanthropic organizations, began to spring up in Africa. These pursuits were aimed at subsistence-level bananas, and though they didn’t generally move beyond the theoretical stage until the 1990s, according to Buddenhagen they did tally one major success: In 1981 Brazilian researchers developed a fusarium-and-Sigatoka-resistant hybrid. The fruit is considered a sweet, or dessert, banana and is widely grown there, but is not seen as a good candidate for Cavendish replacement. Brazilians prefer bananas that most consumers of yellow bananas would consider odd-tasting: They’re just a tad sweet, with a consistency and taste closer to an apple or unripe pear. Not great for cereal. But no Brazil-like progress was being made in Honduras. “The key banana research center and only viable breeding program,” Buddenhagen says, “was dying.”

  Chiquita was simply too distracted, Buddenhagen adds, with “anti-trust, new Latin exporting groups, tariffs, overproduction, hurricanes, buy-outs, and take-overs.” In 1983 Chiquita stopped research altogether. It didn’t close the facility—instead it left a skeleton staff (Rowe and few others) to find another way. The answer was FHIA. The new program, funded by international institutions, would take over the old United Fruit labs. Rowe and his colleagues would now begin to do what the rest of the world’s banana scientists were doing: focusing on the bananas people survived on.

  At the start, FHIA was handicapped by its reputation. Most of the world that knew bananas couldn’t disassociate it from Chiquita. “Too much negative stigma,” Buddenhagen says. Instead, as FHIA scraped by, global banana breeding finally began to take off, with work advancing on nearly every continent. Moreover, though much of the traditional breeding clearly followed in Rowe’s footsteps, new ideas about manipulating bananas at the basic DNA level were beginning to take hold. Conventional breeding had seen too many results that were considered, at best, half successes.

  To outsiders, it seemed that Phil Rowe had become irrelevant.

  Then came Goldfinger.

  IT TOOK A QUARTER CENTURY for Phil Rowe to come up with his dream banana. During that time, Honduras had had nine presidents; Guatemala, ten. The company he began with had changed its name, lost money, lost its leadership position in the market, and lost Eli Black. Black Sigatoka had begun to decimate plantations across the region and had spread to Africa and Asia. The La Lima research facility was abandoned and reborn as FHIA. Through all those years, just twenty banana varieties out of the twenty thousand tested by the facility showed any of the desired traits. But even those bananas weren’t fully realized. They had some of what they needed, but not all.

  Then came the fruit good enough to be designated FHIA-01. Because of its rich color and stubby profile, Rowe nicknamed it Goldfinger.

  I TASTED A GOLDFINGER as I walked through FHIA’s experimental plantation with Juan Fernando Aguilar. “Try this one,” he said, pulling an almost rotund fruit from a towering plant.

  The banana is a cross between the applelike Brazilian Prata and a rare Asian variety collected by United Fruit’s explorers in the 1960s.

  For months I’d been learning what the world’s dream banana needs and repeating it like a mantra, because it is the single most important element of finding a way out of the Cavendish crisis: controllable ripening, tough skin, good taste, high yields, resistance to disease, sturdy trees. I’d also come to believe that such a banana could never truly exist.

  I was about to be proved wrong.

  Phil Rowe’s masterpiece does things no other banana can: It never turns brown. The fruit remains firm and solid for far longer than the Cavendish does. It is a dual-purpose banana: It can be cooked like a plantain when green or eaten like a Cavendish or Gros Michel once it brightens. Goldfinger bunches are full and even oversized—more robust than the Cavendish, even approaching Gros Michel. The leaves that protect Goldfinger are green and thick.

  I stood under the shade of those leaves in the experimental banana farm Rowe founded. For several rows around me, they were the only available respite from the sun. There were other plants as close as three or four feet, but their leaves were rotted and crumbling. They were infected with Black Sigatoka. Goldfinger is virtually immune.

  Aguilar told me that the soil has also been infected with Panama disease. Goldfinger resists that malady as well.

  There’s even more good news about Rowe’s creation. Goldfinger can be grown across a wider spectrum of terrain and weather conditions than the Cavendish, making it—in sufficient volume—cheaper to produce. Because it resists so many pests, it can be grown organically on land that has already been cleared. Other organic bananas need to be grown on relatively freshly cleared land and at higher altitudes, where diseases spread more slowly. There just isn’t enough terrain like that to make naturally grown Cavendish an answer to the Panama disease resurgence, even if the environmental costs of clearing forest for plantations could somehow be mitigated.

  But
, even as Aguilar tells me about Goldfinger’s very real virtues, he and I both know that there is one attribute that can’t be described in words or pointed out on the vine.

  How does Goldfinger taste?

  Aguilar pulls one down—a thick, bright yellow fruit—and hands it to me.

  It peels easily enough, and I’m impressed that the skin is thick: I know enough to recognize a strong banana when I see one.

  I bite into it.

  This is what’s good about Goldfinger. And it is the same thing that isn’t good about Goldfinger. I like this banana. I like it a lot.

  But it doesn’t taste, or feel, like a Cavendish. The flesh is heavier, less creamy. It is tart, with a taste at least as sharp as a Brazilian Prata. You can occasionally find a Goldfinger in a specialty market. Some refer to the fruit as an “apple banana.” The more proper term, when experts characterize the fruit’s taste, is an “acid banana.”