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  • Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas
  • Thomas F. O'Brien
Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Edited by Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg (Durham, Duke University Press, 2003) 363 pp. $79.95

Edited books are, as a rule, risky propositions for their editors and reviewers because the volumes often suffer from the highly uneven quality of the contributions. Banana Wars proves to be a shining exception to that rule. Although it offers a sometimes dizzying array of approaches, the essays, which range over their subject both regionally and topically, are of consistently strong quality. The book divides the industry into two basic regions, Central and South America—where United Fruit and its corporate rivals created massive agribusiness plantations during the first half of the twentieth century—and the Caribbean—where, at least until recently, peasants with the assistance of local governments and the British state created a system of contract farming composed largely of small growers. The topics include the impact of consumer demand on corporate decision making, issues of race imagery, labor struggles, corporate repositioning, the deleterious effects on small Caribbean planters of free trade policies instituted by the European Union and the World Trade Organization, and fascinating insights into corporate mentality as revealed in a collection of United Fruit documents. But for all their diversity, the essays consistently develop two themes that resonate through the history of the industry—the importance of the state, and factors that have served to limit or reshape the powerful corporations that have dominated the banana trade.

Given the enormous power that United and Standard Fruit and their contemporary incarnations—Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte—have exercised over the industry, studies of the banana business have naturally focused on these multinationals. But the case studies illustrate the central role that the state played in the industry's development. In Belize, Panama, and Guatemala for most of the twentieth century, United Fruit's hold over the state made it possible for the company to secure generous land and rail concessions, absurdly low tax levels, and repressive power to deal with unruly workers. Conversely, in Guatemala [End Page 128] during its brief democratic spring (1944–1954), the government's benign social policies allowed unions to flourish. In Ecuador, a conflicted and ineffective state created space for peasants to prevent United Fruit's huge plantation from expanding and for workers to seize portions of the property to create their own small farms, setting the stage for a national industry dominated by local producers. In the Caribbean, island governments have played a central role in controlling the industry through growers associations.

Most of the articles also explore the array of factors that have limited corporate initiatives or forced companies to alter significantly their strategies. Diseases eventually pressured United and Standard Fruit to move away from the Gros Michael banana to disease-resistant varieties of the fruit, but consumer preference delayed that shift. Workers, small growers, and local states in the second half of the twentieth century have succeeded in challenging the power of the giant corporations. During the 1960s, United Fruit, facing declining profits from the ravages of disease, labor militancy, and increased taxation and regulation, transformed itself from a banana-producing enterprise to a global marketing corporation. Ultimately, however, the corporate giants have continued to maintain a dominant position in the industry, and the exploitation of both workers and small growers has continued, even accelerated, during the early years of the twenty-first century.

Thomas F. O'Brien
University of Houston
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