Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (review)

Since 1990, with rising interest in sites of globalization and forms of local agency, there has been an upsurge of writing on the history of banana zones in the Caribbean and Latin America, most associated with the United Fruit Company (UFCo). John Soluri's study of the Honduran region that produced a significant proportion of the world's export bananas between 1870 and 1975 pushes the new work in innovative directions. This splendid transnational history elucidates how the mass production of bananas by foreign companies and the mass consumption of bananas in the United States drove environmental and social change on the north coast of Honduras.

Soluri draws on previously unaccessed records from UFCo's Tropical Research Station in Honduras to describe the paradigm of "modern," "scientific" monoculture espoused by the Company and the proliferation of banana diseases that resulted. Struggles with Panama disease and later Sigatoka influenced both UFCo's land use (its tendency to monopolize great expanses so as to shift cultivation from diseased to new areas) and work roles on its plantations. To fight banana disease in the late 1930s and 1940s, the Company devised chemical fungicides that created the new role of banana sprayer. By collecting workers' life histories, Soluri gets at their perceptions of the dangers of hand spraying as well as the everyday work and social lives of men and women in the banana region.

Beyond its rigorous, illuminating explanation of the causes and multi-faceted impacts of banana disease, this work is innovative in its concomitant focus on banana markets and consumption in the United States. First, by closely examining the records of U.S. fruit dispatchers, he traces the U.S. market's creation of the standardized banana (the Gros Michel), on which North American consumer demand focused. Second, by creatively drawing on movies, poetry, advertisements, jokes, and popular songs, Soluri explores the meanings of this standardized banana in North American consumer culture: a prism for U.S. images of the tropics, at the same time the ubiquitous banana came to symbolize upper-class anxieties about the leveling effects of mass consumption on social status.

While Soluri shows the immense impact of the foreign firm on the landscape and people of the Honduran north coast, he also strongly underlines the problems the Company faced. Blinkered by its insistence on large-scale, "scientific" monoculture, which inadvertently propagated plant diseases, and limited by the North American demand for a specific kind of banana, which halted the search for a fungus-resistant variety, UFCo circumscribed its own range of action. As Soluri argues, "[T]he fruit companies' political and economic power conditioned, but did not determine, the historical trajectory of export banana production in Honduras and elsewhere. . . . Viewed from the ground level, export banana production appeared more like a series of improvisations . . . than a well-scripted global power play" (p. 217). Soluri's analysis provides a convincing explanation of the difficulties that prompted the UFCo's shift from direct ownership to contract farming and from the Gros Michel to the Cavendish banana (developed by Standard Fruit) in the 1950s and thereafter. In his final chapter, Soluri takes the significance of his study outward in a tour de force comparison of bananas to other agricultural commodities—coffee, sugar, and the citrus fruits of California—that questions the tendency to regard bananas as exceptional because they were produced by foreign investment. In proposing a framework that centers on the dynamic interplay of mass production and consumption and connections between social and environmental transformation, the author raises important questions for investigation.

In such an ambitious work, it is to be expected that some themes get dropped along the way. This reader would have liked a clearer picture of the landscape and inhabitants of the banana-producing zone in the latter years of the study (the 1960s and 1970s). But this is a...