Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas (review)

At the height of the presidential impeachment trial in late 1999, Bill Clinton announced that the United States was imposing a range of punitive tariffs on European luxury goods in response to the European Union's failure to dismantle trade protections for, among other things, bananas. The trade conflict, important enough to distract a president from his own impeachment, is at the heart of a well-organized series of essays edited by Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg. As the "Banana Wars" involved the heads of state of the world's most powerful nations, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers beyond historians. Those who are interested in the changing role of labor groups, the dubious actions of powerful banana corporations, and the involvement of government agencies in mediating commodity production and the terms of its sale also will find the book of value.

With the diminishing influence of the dependency school of economic development, many Latin American historians and social scientists have turned to a commodity-chain model to explain market development for monoculture products, their production, the labor organization on plantations, the role of state mediation, and the influence of corporate suppliers as they foster the commodity's demand in the developed world. By applying this framework to bananas, Striffler and Moberg capture many of its merits; namely, the book is free to explore a wide range of linkages between a commodity's production and its sale hundreds or thousands of miles away without being confined to the neoclassical economist's deterministic model or the limits of national boundaries. Nonetheless, because the editors' expertise is in labor history, Banana Wars spends most of its time on the production side of the equation. It discusses the evolution of the American market for bananas, but it only gives passing reference to the enormous changes in shipping brought about by banana companies. The rich comparisons of differing models of production within and across regions compensate for the lighter treatment of transportation and supply.

The creation of a banana world market 150 years ago, the waxing and waning of its strongest producers and suppliers, and the final coming-to-blows of the United States and Europe over banana trade protections are the topics of the first of three sections. Laura Raynolds begins with the absorbing details of Bill Clinton's distraction: the ruling by the World Trade Organization (WTO) that the United States could impose tariffs on Louis Vuitton handbags, cashmere sweaters, and other luxury goods in response to Europe's continued protection of Caribbean banana producers. Raynolds helpfully explains the difference between the large-scale and corporate "dollar banana" production of Central and South America and the small-holder "ACP" banana production of the Caribbean. She is correct to stress the point that the United Fruit Company (UFCo) built an enormous empire because, as an early starter in the industry, it was the first to develop the scale that would allow it to continue operating profitably even after one or two of its plantations were ravaged by disease or storm. The company's unscrupulous tactics, heavy-handedness, and—as Phillippe Bourgois's chapter clearly shows—racism were the result of its bully-on-the-block ability to force Latin American countries into competition with themselves. John Soluri and Marcelo Bucheli detail UFCo's success in bringing the banana into nearly every worker's lunchbox but whose profits eroded by the 1950s when it faced new competition, antitrust suits, and organized labor.

The following two sections of the book closely examine the various manners in which workers have grown and shipped bananas, the ways they organized and conflicted with nationalist groups or with the banana corporations, and what this all means for the small Caribbean growers who are losing their European protections. In the second section Mark Moberg, Steve Striffler, and...