The Banana: A Tragic History Hiding in Plain Sight

There was a plantation strike in a town in Colombia. Around 12 o’clock, more than 3,000 people workers, women, children, had spilled out into the open space in front of the station and were pressing into the neighboring streets, which the army had closed off with rows of machine guns.

The crowd remained in the square even after they were ordered to disperse. A second warning was met with defiance. Another moment passed and fourteen machine guns answered at once. Three thousand striking banana workers are killed; there bodies, one by one, are thrown in the ocean.

This incident was described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude–a fictional account of life in a town in Colombia. But a similar massacre really did take place in Colombia in 1929, Dan Koeppel tells us in his book Banana, The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.

A Singular Ubiquity. Besides a particularly tragic history, what sets the banana apart is its ubiquity. Bananas are consumed more than any other fruit on Earth, Koeppel writes. “Americans eat more bananas per year than apples and oranges combined.”

But the fruit that most Americans take for granted has played a major role in shaping history. One example Koeppel gives is the overthrow of Guatemala’s government in the early 1950s.

At the time, the banana companies owned 70 percent of the nation’s arable land, but let more than three-fourths of it lie fallow. The nation’s president, Jacobo Arbenz, decreed that nearly a quarter million acres of the land be divided among 100,000 families. In return, the banana company United Fruit would receive $600,000.

United Fruit balked at the deal. Instead, the company turned to the U.S. government for help, where its connections ran deep. The U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had been a partner in the law firm that represented the company, Koeppel writes. Dulles’s brother, Allen, was head of the CIA and a former member of United Fruit’s board. Ed Whitman, United Fruit’s internal PR head, was married to President Eisenhower’s private secretary.

Guatemala. In mid-1953 President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to oust Arbenz, Keoppel says. When the effort proved unsuccessful, a naval blockade was imposed on Guatemala. With mounting pressure from an intense U.S. propaganda campaign, Arbenz resigned. “At the airport, he was stripped to his underwear and paraded before the press as he boarded a plane to Mexico,” Keoppel writes. For decades after the county was ruled by a series of dictatorial governments.

The banana has plenty of its own problems. Since the 1920s the fruit has been plagued by Panama Disease. Keoppel describes how the industry switched from the Gros Michel banana to the Cavendish by the late 1950s.

However, the same disease now threatens the Cavendish. A more connected world coupled with modern agricultural practices make it so the disease that took about 75 years to kill off the Gros Michel is likely spread and wipe out the Cavendish at a faster rate. Depending on the circumstances, Keoppel estimates that the banana may be wiped out in a little as five years or in as much as 30.

Fertility Problem. Part of the problem is that banana plants are notoriously difficult to reproduce. It involves creating hybrids using banana seeds. Only one in 10,000 bananas has a seed, Keoppel says. The odds of having a seed that actually grows in a greenhouse are even smaller. This method could take years to develop a banana that is resistant to Panama Disease, Keoppel says.

Technologies are being developed that may allow for bananas to someday be genetically modified, according to Keoppel. But there is a general opposition to so-called “Frankenfoods” in Europe.

More open to the idea is the U.S., which Keopple says eats more genetically modified food than anywhere else in the world.

For Keopple, the solution is to genetically modify bananas to resist Panama Disease. While he concedes this  solution poses certain risks, Keopple says it’s time for consumers to shoulder some responsibility for the world’s most popular fruit.  “For a hundred years, we have allowed whatever risk there is in bananas to be borne elsewhere; in the town squares in Colombia, along railroad lines in Costa Rica…,” Keopple notes.

Unlike it’s predecessor, Keopple says a banana produced in a lab could be the most perfect fruit.