Bananas, p.3
Bananas, page 3
United Fruit whittled the varieties for its purposes down to one. This was the Gros Michel or ‘Big Mike’. It was economically ‘efficient’, good for profits. More sizeable than alternative varieties like the Red Macabu or Lady Finger, Big Mike meant consumers simply ate more banana. It also travelled well. With a thicker skin than some, Big Mike arrived at its destination with less bruising.
United Fruit was a pioneer of mass production. With its one-size-fits-all banana, the company beat Henry Ford, the man often credited as the pioneer of industrial standardisation, by a number of years. Big Mike was on the shelves at the turn of the twentieth century; the Model T motor car, on the other hand, rolled off the production line in 1908.
Big Mike also suited the most general of tastes. It was not too big or too small, too yellow, or too sweet. In fact, it was a little bland. After a while no one really knew any different, incapable as they were of remembering any other kind. United Fruit’s bananas were the forerunners of those products we know today: the cup of cross-cultural coffee foam; the multinational hamburger. For Big Mike read Big Mac.
Bananas weren’t seen in great number in Europe till some way into the first decade of the twentieth century. My grandmother recalled people biting straight into them; they had to be shown how to peel them. Today the British and Americans eat twelve to thirteen kilos, about seventy bananas per person per year. Developing countries mainly consume savoury cooking bananas, a staple of diet. The banana is the world’s fourth major food after rice, wheat and milk.
It is thought to have originated in the rainforests of Malaysia in the Stone Age, discovered by cavemen some ten thousand years ago. The name ‘banana’ comes from Africa. At some time, somehow it jumped continents. Experts rummaging in fossilised rubbish pits in Cameroon have found banana tissue dating back 2,500 years. From West Africa the banana found its way to the Canaries, and thence onward with the Spanish conquest to the Americas.
The entrepreneurial friar Tomás de Berlanga landed with it in 1516 in Hispaniola, the island now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. He ascended Catholicism’s corporate ladder to become bishop of Panama and took the banana with him as he moved west across the Caribbean to the Central American mainland.
Early reports in the US had it turning up in Salem, Massachusetts in the 1690s, during the strange period of the witch-hunts. Someone cooked up the fruit with pork and may have decided it tasted like the devil’s own food. Bananas disappeared in the north-eastern US till the early nineteenth century when they fetched up again with old sea dogs from the Caribbean as items for sale, or gifts for incredulous relatives and friends.
In 1950s North London we got ours from the Banana Man halfway up Islington’s Chapel Market. He was a sad-faced Italian, growling ‘’ere y’are, getchyer bananas’. The label on each bunch, in white letters against a dark blue background, said ‘Fyffes’. I mistakenly took this to be a ‘British’ company – one of those that were all around us like Woolworth’s and Ford. But at that time Fyffes was part of the United Fruit Company.*
The banana’s cheeriness looked unconvincing in the grey of smoggy London but it was always there, where seasonal fruits like apples weren’t. Soon we took it for granted. If we had thought about it, we would have been aware that it was from the hot countries, and poor ones too. But we would have had no idea the fruit came by way of an intensive process of production, shipping and distribution.
The fact of the matter was that for most of the twentieth century United Fruit had a monopoly on the industry. Today four companies dominate, Chiquita, Del Monte and Dole from the US, and Noboa from Ecuador. A name sometimes given them speaks for the banana industry’s ‘buccaneering’ tradition: the ‘Wild Bunch’.
Now the banana itself is disappearing. It is apparently going the way of its creator, United Fruit. In 2003 it emerged that the banana might have only a decade to live. Its main growing regions of the tropics have no seasons as understood in temperate climes. The banana, therefore, is always working and has no downtime. The same applies to the pathogens created for no other reason than to attack it.
Panama disease is what they call a fusarial wilt, a microbe that attacks from beneath at the root of the plant. It cuts off the banana plant’s water supply and chokes it to death. Sigatoka is named after a verdant valley in Fiji, where it was first identified, and is a spore that sweeps in on the wind and rain. It attacks the leaves of the plant, removing the protection they afford the fruit, which then ripens prematurely. Black sigatoka has emerged as a nasty variant, while Panama disease has recently derived a new form of its own. No one comes up with colourful names anymore: this one is just called by its laboratory name of ‘Tropical Race 4’.
The banana, however, has a deeper weakness. This is genetic. Most bananas on inspection have no seeds to talk of, which, in reproductive terms, is a disaster. The banana does not come to us by the processes of botanical intercourse. The New Scientist pointed this out when it broke the news of the banana’s pending demise. The banana ‘hasn’t had sex for thousands of years’, said the magazine unkindly. The fruit is effectively a clone, discovered by those Malaysian cavemen and planted from cuttings ever since. Without sexual reproduction to re-combine its genes in new arrangements, the banana has become more vulnerable to disease. This has been made worse by the commercial fixation of producing a single variety everywhere. The banana is ripe for attack from any potential pest since, while its pests are constantly evolving to find ways of carrying out their onslaught, the banana is not evolving at all.
Big Mike succumbed as long ago as the 1950s. Another variety, the Cavendish, was found to replace it and called ‘disease resistant’ but now faces the same fate. Disease has been a threat for many years, without the public knowing it. Panama disease hit United Fruit’s plantations in Panama over a hundred years ago. Sigatoka hit Central America in the 1930s.
United Fruit and its successors have since waged war on the banana’s enemies with pesticides and fungicides being pumped onto the fruit at an increasing rate. Of the world’s major food crops, the banana is the most chemically treated and we trust a great deal, therefore, to the prophylactic powers of its skin. The chemicals have proved ever less effective for the task assigned them, however, and the revelation in 2003 of the banana’s crisis came when it finally seemed to dawn on the companies that they had run out of ideas.
For many years they had left the banana-producing countries, with their scant resources, to seek alternative solutions themselves. Scientists skilled in genetic modification have now been hired in an effort to clone in some factor – to discover the mysterious combinations – that might save the fruit.
But, as they graft and clone, so the banana is dying, and a process that might have occurred anyway over the centuries has been greatly accelerated by United Fruit and its kind. It took the fruit out of the jungle and turned a natural product into a ‘commodity’, a thing of commerce and the mass market. As a result it appears unequal to the business of survival.
United Fruit’s own demise seemed to precede what may well be that of the product it gave us by some thirty to forty years. According to most accounts, the business practices that United Fruit was synonymous with have been consigned to the historical dustbin. Lately, however, the signs are of the old company’s re-emergence as a model for the corporate world. The spirit it championed has been revamped and presented to us as the miracle formula by which we are required to live in the era of globalisation.
The whole business of United Fruit began, by chance, one hundred and forty years ago.
* Today Fyffes is Irish and independent.
3
Roots of Empire
Chief justice of the Supreme Court of Costa Rica, Dr José María Castro rose to his feet at midday on August 18, 1871 to make his speech. A collection of the nation’s dignitaries was gathered behind him on the large wooden podium: the archbishop of San José, from the country’s capital fifteen miles away to the east; the large coffee growers, still sizing up what this day would signify for them; Doña Pacífica Fernández de Castro, the speaker’s wife and designer of the national flag, was also present, along with several of their fifteen children. Seated next to her was the guest of honour, General Tomás Guardia, the new president. He had seized power the year before, proclaiming that he would ‘break the oligarchy’ and ‘establish democracy’. To achieve this Costa Rica needed to be connected to the world.
Castro had twice been president of the republic and twice deposed by the army. The coffee oligarchs who controlled the wealth of the country regularly got together with the military to impose or depose presidents as they wished. General Guardia had recently taken over, vowing that this would not happen again. It was the reason Costa Rica was getting the railway.
The railroad would run from the small town of Alajuela, at the western end of the mesa, Costa Rica’s high upland plateau. It would proceed east for 100 miles down to the Atlantic coast. Generally no one went there. The flag that Doña Pacífica had designed – now strung from balconies and lampposts in Alajuela’s tiny streets and town square in the breeze of an immaculately clear Costa Rican day – showed the nation’s problem: at the banner’s centre was a broad horizontal stripe in red, for the sun that warmed the mesa on which nearly all Costa Ricans lived. The white bands around it were for the mid-afternoon clouds that brought the rain to irrigate its rich volcanic soil. The blue stripes at the outer edges represented Costa Rica’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
The Pacific was fine: it had a port. From there, Costa Rica’s coffee went out to the world. The trouble was that both the coffee and any wealthy Costa Ricans bound for the east coast of the United States and Europe had to sail around the perilous Cape Horn. The journey, if completed, took months. The only alternative was the railroad across Panama, built by the US for the gold rush in the 1850s and its ramshackle carriages still full of the roughnecks that followed in its path.
In 1502, on his fourth voyage, Columbus had landed on the Atlantic coast and called it ‘Costa Rica’, the ‘rich coast’. It was an act of wishful thinking. He had to report back to his patrons at home, to whom he had oversold the goods on offer; ‘lands of vanity and delusion’ they were calling them. Columbus left Costa Rica for the most miserable stage of his voyages yet, his fleet tramping the coast in northerly storms looking for what he imagined might be a sea passage through to China. He turned for home racked with arthritis and with his ships being eaten by seaworms.
Costa Rica’s large Atlantic province of Limón remained mostly uninhabited but that, as Castro assured his audience, would soon change. Twelve thousand people had packed into Alajuela, one in twelve of the nation’s population, and they listened as he mapped out the future. Fifty years on from independence from Spain, the swamp and desolation of Limón would succumb to the force of progress.
The task had been assigned to the finest in the business. This was Henry ‘Don Enrique’ Meiggs, the great American railway builder, presently resident in Peru. The contracts had been signed and the pledges made: the railway would be finished in three years. At which point, and by the grace of God and General Guardia, Costa Ricans would be led down from their mountain to the sea.
After the cheers, the archbishop gave the Te Deum. Guardia descended from the podium to turn the project’s first clod of earth with a silver shovel, specially cast. It started to rain, a little earlier than normal. After siesta the crowds took to the streets again with itinerant bands of acrobats and musicians. The parties, and a ball for the VIPs, went on until five the following morning.
Those placed in charge of the works had not yet arrived. Henry Keith, thirty-two, and his younger brother by nine years, Minor, were still at sea. They had taken a steamer south from New York and at Panama would cross the Central American isthmus on the railway built for the gold rush. On the Pacific side they took a ship north to Costa Rica and arrived on the mesa three weeks after the official opening of the works on the railway, ‘at the trot of their horses’.
Through them, ‘Don Enrique’ Meiggs, their uncle, conveyed his regrets. He wouldn’t have time to construct Costa Rica’s railway since he was otherwise engaged. He was building Peru’s line from Lima up into the Andes, a bigger and far trickier project. His nephews, however, came with all the necessary skills for the task at hand and as part of the family firm. He thoroughly recommended them.
For all the prowess ascribed to him as an engineer, Meiggs was principally a talented political fixer and, when he was caught out, a crook. From Brooklyn, he had followed the gold rush and made a fortune from land speculation on the San Francisco waterfront. Accused of theft of city funds and stock market fraud, he later fled to South America. He made more millions from building the coastal railways of Chile and Peru before spotting a greater opportunity in the guano deposits, a key source of agricultural fertiliser, of Peru’s offshore Chincha Islands. Estimates of his fortune from this slippery enterprise went as high as five hundred million dollars; this was incredible for the day and, if true, put Meiggs halfway to being a birdshit billionaire. He employed some of his monetary reserves vetting membership of the governments of Peru, Chile and Bolivia, and arranging tax rates to his advantage.
Henry Keith had been with his uncle in Peru at the time the deal was struck and had assured the Costa Ricans that he knew the area where their railway was to be. Every construction company of any worth was interested in building a canal across Central America. Panama was one possible location for it, but the favoured candidate was the San Juan River dividing Costa Rica and Nicaragua on their Atlantic coasts. Henry Keith had been there, he said, and had surveyed the Limón seaboard. He understood whatever hazards it might have in store. On that basis, Costa Rica’s railway would take three years to complete.
The Keiths were from Brooklyn, their father a wealthy lumber merchant. They were Scottish some generations back; family tales had them on eleventh-century nodding terms with King Malcolm II. Allegedly they had had some claim to royal title and land in the region of East Lothian. The Meiggs side of the family claimed English background and to have emigrated from the southern county of Dorset in 1635.
The junior of the two, Minor Cooper Keith had not settled to anything. An expensive education saw him take up a position in menswear in a Broadway store at three dollars a week. He went into wood with his father, who then – having bought Padre Island, a hundred-mile sandbar off the Texas coast – sent Minor to run it as a ranch. Surrounded by a lot of water, wildfowl and deer, Minor enjoyed the solitude but not a great deal of luck. Market prices were not what he had hoped for. A hurricane off the Gulf of Mexico also blew a thousand of his cows into the sea. When his brother Henry wrote to him saying he could make more money in Costa Rica in three years than on Padre in a lifetime, he was easily persuaded. With so many in search of El Dorado, Minor took off in pursuit of his.
Older brother Henry took the easy part of the work, on the mesa. A locomotive was on rails and running around Alajuela within weeks, scaring the people; ‘they thought to hell it would take them’, said a report of the engine that spat steam and fire. Henry named it the ‘Limón Number One’.
Minor was packed off to Limón with mules and a guide. ‘Dreary miles of uninhabited beach’, read one description of the scene that greeted him, ‘but for the huts of a few Caribs and other Indians’. There was no fresh meat or vegetables. Stretching away into the unremitting heat lay the ‘interminable swamp’.
Minor Keith’s job was to run the workforce. He was to hire it and sell it things from the commissary, the company store: clothing, basic provisions and machetes for hand-to-hand combat with the jungle. He had some banana cuttings that he had picked up on his way to Costa Rica while passing through Panama. He planted them. The fruit would grow quite quickly and he could sell it to the men.
Some Jamaicans had already been hired to clear the jungle and swamp but Minor wanted hardened US labour. He took the project’s steamboat to New Orleans to recruit from its waterfront bars and flophouses. At a dollar a day and food, many occupants of the city’s jail were also keen to offer their services. As they lined up on the dockside ready to embark, the police chief couldn’t believe his luck in getting rid of them.
Keith’s recruits included a good number of US Civil War veterans. Some even had tropical experience of a kind. The latter had been William Walker’s men. Walker was another Scots emigré and had come to the US in the 1840s. He had also set off to chance his luck in Central America. His methods of extending the US frontier were more Old World than New and in the 1850s he had declared himself King of Nicaragua. The US government in Washington, enamoured of this regal idea, gave him its support.
His mistake was to make an enemy of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the US railway and shipping magnate who had established a presence in the area with the intention of building the trans-isthmian canal. When Walker fired on Vanderbilt’s boats on the San Juan River between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Vanderbilt hired Central American mercenaries to retaliate. Walker fled for the US aboard an American gunboat. He later returned to pronounce himself king again, though he only made it as far as Nicaragua’s northern neighbour, Honduras. Here in 1860 he was put against a wall and shot.
Many of Keith’s new employees jumped ship in Havana, the first port of call made to take on sugar. When the boat ran aground on the Chinchorro Bank in a night storm off Yucatán, Keith and a few loyalists had to hold off the rest at gunpoint from rushing the lifeboats. Only when the storm eased next day were the malcontents persuaded to help jettison cargo and re-float the boat.
