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People, Plants, and Pathogens: The Eco-social Dynamics of Export Banana Production in Honduras, 1875-1950

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-3-463

1527-1900

John Soluri,

Global trade, sustainability, and social impact

In July 1899, six municipal officials in El Paraíso, Honduras, placed their signatures on a document that listed the names of area residents who grew bananas for export. The municipal secretary, Bartolomé Bueso, signed with a heavy hand, perhaps an indication of the fatigue running through his fingers after recording more than two hundred names complete with several columns of statistics related to banana production. Similar scenes took place in other Honduran municipalities in response to a national survey carried out with the intention of making known "one of the great sources of wealth of our Atlantic Coast."1 That same year, another group of men met in Trenton, New Jersey, to sign a different type of document—a corporate charter that established the United Fruit Company. The creation of both documents reflected a shared perception that export banana growing was a lucrative livelihood. However, the survey was never published and passed into obscurity on a dusty shelf in the Honduran National Archive. In contrast, the United Fruit Company— known in Central America as El Pulpo (the Octupus) because of its far-reaching economic power and political entanglements—has been the subject of numerous scholarly investigations, polemics, and popular legends. The very different fates of these two projects undertaken in 1899 reflect not only the historical power of United Fruit but also the power of historical narratives to push entire sets of actors off-stage in order to simplify their plots.In the case of the Honduran banana industry, the actors who have largely been left out of the drama are the small-scale growers (poquiteros), whose initiative and labor helped to give rise to the industry in the late nineteenth century. The pioneering research carried out by Charles Kepner and Jay Soothill discussed the relationship between "independent growers" and the United Fruit Company during the 1930s, but provided little by way of historical context.2 Subsequent generations of researchers have tended to marginalize non-company growers for diverse reasons. For writers who credited the fruit companies with "modernizing" banana production in Honduras, small-scale cultivators and their low input farming methods represented vestiges from the trade's "chaotic" early years.3 On the other hand, studies utilizing marxist frameworks have focused primarily on interactions between foreign capital and workers in enclave economies.4There are notable exceptions to these general tendencies. For example, recent works by Darío Euraque and Ethel García Burchard have demonstrated the key role that elite planters played in shaping twentieth-century Honduran politics.5 In the last decade a number of authors have explored the complex relationships between banana companies, nation-states, local elites, and working peoples in export banana-growing regions in Central America (including Belize), Colombia, Ecuador, and the Caribbean.6 This scholarship has stressed both the interactions between local and global economic processes and how ethnicity, gender, and class have shaped the historical meanings of those interactions. Several of these studies examine the role played by contract growers in the banana trade during the second half of the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the relationship among growers, banana companies, and state institutions.Collectively, this growing body of scholarship identifies much-needed agency among working peoples by demonstrating how international capital was compelled to adapt to local conditions in order to secure land, labor, and political favors. However, researchers have devoted little attention to what was presumably the day-to-day business of both fruit companies and working peoples: growing bananas for export.7 Perhaps the "everydayness" of enduring—the drudgery of making one's livelihood—turns people, historians included, to the study of more redemptive projects such as strikes, rebellions and other challenges to power. To be sure, people have engaged in the work of converting tropical sunlight, plants, soils, and water into bananas for millenia, but this process has been anything but static. By shifting the focus to the changing work of banana growing, this study explores the dynamic relationships among the landscapes, production processes, and livelihoods that shaped the eco-social spaces in which power was contested.Scholarly accounts of the banana industry often contain contradictory images of tropical environments. On the one hand, tropical landscapes serve as static backdrops that fade as soon as the spotlight is turned on the human drama. On the other hand, the environment is periodically invoked in the form of a natural force such as a hurricane or plant pest that human actors must (heroically) overcome. These forces are sometimes used to help explain the banana industry's historical trajectory. For example, in his 1936 study, Social Aspects of the Banana Industry, Charles Kepner argued that the consolidation of the banana trade could be attributed largely to the "hurricanes, floods, droughts and plant disease," that were capable of ruining small-scale growers who lacked the transnational production network maintained by the United Fruit Company. Writing two decades after Kepner, Stacy May and Galo Plazo defended United Fruit's immense land holdings by pointing to the company's need for soils free of a plant pathogen popularly known as Panama Disease (mál de Panamá or mata muerta). Panama Disease has been widely viewed by plant pathologists to be among the most economically significant epidemics of the twentieth century.8 An increasing number of researchers have noted the role played by Panama Disease in shaping the industry's history in Central and South America and some continue to include the disease among the factors "inherent in the production and marketing of bananas" that contributed to the emergence of multinational corporations.9 These narratives generally portray U.S. banana companies as on the run from a natural phenomenon—a tropical disease—whose origin implicitly lies in an environment long held to be "unhealthy."10These constructions of tropical landscapes as simultaneously passive and disruptive result from a tendency to view the human-environment dynamic as unidirectional: in the first case, people act upon a passive environment; in the second instance, a set of natural (that is, ahistorical) forces act upon people. In both cases, there is a failure to recognize the interactivity between human and non-human actors. The story that follows offers an alternative vision of tropical environments that focuses on the historical connections among the diverse people, not-so-diverse plants, and persistent yet unpredictable pathogens that shaped and reshaped tropical landscapes and livelihoods. My approach is based on the assumption that banana plants and pathogens are best understood as evolving biological organisms whose historical importance and meanings are socially constituted. I am less interested in arguing for the primacy of either social or biological processes than in demonstrating the historical entanglement of the two. I try to accomplish this by borrowing concepts from the emerging field of agroecology. Agroecology focuses on the interactions between specific cropping systems and their surrounding environments, the boundaries of which are fluid and permeable.11 The plants, soils, and water converted into export bananas were not passive, infinitely malleable "natural resources" but dynamic components of an eco-social space shaped by historical processes operating at local and transnational levels.The rise of the banana trade led to a large influx of people, capital, and technologies to the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Working people laid hundreds of kilometers of railroad track, cleared thousands of hectares of forest, and excavated tons of earth in the process of building drainage ditches and open irrigation canals. These activities transformed landscapes on a wide-scale and triggered new agroecological dynamics. Changes in local landscapes were not the only factors that shaped export banana cultivation. The structures and aesthetic sensibilities of distant marketplaces exerted an indirect effect on production practices. As the banana passed from being an exotic novelty to join apples, grapes, and citrus as standard fare in U.S. fruit baskets, defining quality became increasingly important. By the turn of the century, U.S. markets had developed rather particular notions about just what constituted a banana. These "market preferences" reflected not only consumer taste per se, but also the desire of shippers, wholesalers, and retailers to rationalize distribution and marketing. This required a uniform commodity whose handling, storage, and marketing needs would be predictable. Thus, the evolution of production practices on banana farms responded to both local agroecological change and international market standards developed in the United States and Europe.Working at the intersection of the production and consumption of export bananas was a cadre of professional scientists enlisted to help find a control for Panama Disease. The epidemic sparked research efforts on the part of U.S. and British scientists working in Caribbean research centers. The United Fruit Company began conducting research in Panama as early as 1910 and later established research facilities in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Colombia. Although much has been written about the company's political and economic power, relatively little attention has been given to its role in defining the science of banana growing during the twentieth century.12 By examining the published and unpublished reports of both company and non-company scientists, I demonstrate that researchers endeavoring to find a control for Panama Disease confronted a tension between biological possibilities and marketplace constraints. Scientific agendas also reflected both the short-term needs of the banana companies and a broader set of assumptions about what constituted an efficient agricultural system in the tropics.In the process of deconstructing one set of scientific ideas, I appropriate another—the conceptual language of agroecologists—which rests on its own set of assumptions. For my purposes, agroecology's most important premise is that virtually all landscapes, including forested ones, have been shaped over time by interactions with people. This "historical turn" in the ecological sciences represents an alternative to less dynamic models of ecosystems based on equilibrium and predictable stages of plant community succession. Agroecology then, opens up fertile ground in which new hybrid projects involving historians can take root. For scholars and others concerned about the exercise of bio-power in Latin America and beyond, it is imperative to tell stories that simultaneously deconstruct scientific paradigms while nourishing cross-disciplinary alliances capable of appropriating scientific discourses and technologies. In this way, historians can help to cultivate visions of landscapes and livelihoods shaped by a biology of possibilities rather than the reductive determinism underlying much of the enthusiasm for capital-intensive biotechnologies. Thus what follows is a history whose most ambitious goal is to take one tentative step back to the future.In 1875 U.S. consular agent Frank Frye reported that he was moving the U.S. consulate from San Pedro Sula to Utila, a small island that lay some 40 miles off the coast of Honduras.13 Hardly a momentous historical event in itself, the relocation came in response to the emergence of a vibrant banana trade between the Bay Islands and New Orleans. Frye contrasted the "very small" amount of trade on the mainland to that of Utila and its larger island neighbor, Roatan, where the fruit trade was "brisk and constantly on the increase."14 Four years later, at least six U.S. steamship companies were servicing the islands and demand for bananas was outstripping supply. By the early 1880s, U.S. consuls reported that the banana trade was also giving rise to "thriving villages" on the mainland. In 1889 the Honduran government granted steamships servicing Puerto Cortés exemptions from port duties.15 This policy measure reflected the expansion of banana growing on the mainland, an expansion that appears to have come at the expense of growers on Utila and Roatan. In 1890 a Honduran official observed that shippers "nearly always" preferred to buy fruit from mainland growers.16 Contemporary observers attributed the geographical shift to multiple factors that included the willingness of mainland growers to undersell their island neighbors, government tariff policies that favored mainland ports, and perceptions that the quality of island fruit was in decline. By 1901 banana exports from Roatan and Utila had all but ceased.17Several eco-social factors help to explain the emergence of small-scale, export banana production on the mainland. Banana plants (Musa varieties) thrived in the region's warm, humid climate, and alluvial soils. Late-nineteenth-century descriptions of cultivation practices indicate that labor inputs were limited to land clearing (often accomplished by burning), planting and a single cycle of weeding.18 No major pests or plant diseases were reported in Honduras prior to the 1910s. Harvesting and hauling fruit stems that weighed up to one hundred pounds were not easy tasks, but they were not as arduous (or hazardous) as cutting sugarcane.19 The herbaceous banana plant produced fruit within one year, generating a much faster return on a grower's investment than was obtainable from lowland tree cash crops such as cacao and coconuts.20 Finally, the self-propagating banana did not require annual replanting.Thus, labor requirements were relatively light and evenly distributed over the course of a year. Since fruit matured throughout the calendar year, a grower did not have to endure extended periods without income. This theoretically reduced the need for extended credit. Of course, banana cultivation required access to land. Although no comprehensive study of late-nineteenth-century land tenure exists for the lowland regions of Honduras, municipal records strongly suggest that small-scale cultivators had access to both ejido and national lands.21 From an economic standpoint, banana cultivation was a viable livelihood for growers with limited access to capital and labor. Attempts to explain the origin of the trade should also note the central place occupied by plantains and other varieties of Musa in the nineteenth-century diets of Central American and Caribbean peoples. The first growers to sell bananas for export may have perceived their actions less as a transformative process than an alteration of well-established patterns.22Early export banana growing was hardly risk free. Although hurricanes seldom struck the Honduran coastline, less formidable wind storms could lay waste to plants that routinely grew to heights of six or seven meters; "blow-downs" claimed a significant percentage of maturing fruit every year. The rainy season often brought flooding that damaged fields and washed out roads leading to market outlets. Stray cattle posed yet another potential danger. In the late nineteenth century, conflicts between cultivators and ranchers over land-use issues surfaced in a number of municipalities, leading to the creation of zoning codes that increasingly favored the rights of banana growers over those of ranchers.23 The trade was further disrupted by labor shortages induced by violent clashes between competing political factions. Workers, fearful of being drafted, often fled into the hinterlands until the fighting subsided.The risks associated with growing export bananas did not end when the fruit was harvested. Once cut, the highly perishable commodity had to be transported with both speed and care, two goals that were seldom compatible when growers relied on ox-carts to transport fruit over muddy roads to ports. The chronically under-funded National Railroad, which serviced banana-growing districts between San Pedro Sula and Puerto Cortés, came under frequent criticism for the bumping and jostling that the fruit received on its journey. Growers had a strong economic interest in ensuring that their fruit reached ports in good condition: shippers often rejected bananas that they deemed to be unmarketable. Evaluating fruit quality was highly subjective in practice. The frequency of rejections was linked to changes in supply and demand: bananas that sold in months of high demand (for example, March) might be rejected in months of low demand (for example, December). Thus, even though bananas could be harvested throughout the year, producers tried to time their heaviest production for the period between March and Septem-ber, when demand for the fruit peaked in the United States.24Significantly, growers' complaints about shippers predate the industry's consolidation.25 Writing from the fledgling banana port of Tela in 1889, Jesús Quiros complained that the banana trade, "which should have produced immense benefits" for the community, was suffering due to the "deceitful ways" of steamship captains who took advantage of grower vulnerabilities.26 In 1893 dozens of Tela-based growers appealed to Honduran President General Leiva to regulate steamship schedules and fruit sales in order to eliminate the "abuses to which we are subject by the current steamship lines."27 That same year, the growers saw many of their requests written into law when the Honduran Congress passed the first national legislation regulating the banana industry. The law restricted fruit sales to designated points, created fruit inspectors to oversee sales, and established an export tax, the revenues from which were to be used to pay the salaries of the inspectors and to provide subsidies for shipping companies.28 Ironically, the law's implementation angered fruit growers in Tela who refused to pay the export tax on the grounds that the inspectors' tallies often did not correspond with the number of stems for which they had been paid. Steamer traffic continued to be irregular in 1894, placing the community in a "precarious situation" due to the lack of fruit sales.29In order to gain leverage in their transactions with shippers, many growers formed associations; In 1889, for example, Rafael Rodríguez, José María Vásquez, Manuel Mejía, and Pedro de Peralta joined with several other prominent growers in the La Ceiba region to form the Honduran Fruit Company of La Ceiba.30 The company obliged shareholders to supply an agreed-upon number of bananas to the company at prices set by a board of directors. Members who sold their fruit to other shippers faced fines and possible expulsion from the organization. In 1894, 85 growers created the San Pedro Sula-based Sociedad Bananera, with the objective of "promoting the development of the banana industry by finding the means to overcome the obstacles presently impeding the progress of the industry on this coast."31 In order to join, a potential member needed just one manzana (0.69 hectares) of bananas. The 1899 survey of growers included 39 charter members of the Sociedad Bananera. Farm sizes for this group ranged from 1.4 to 84 hectares; only four growers worked more than 30 hectares of bananas, an indication that large-scale producers did not dominate the organization.32 In 1895, 150 individuals, including 17 women, founded the Sociedad Bananera Gremio Agrario de Omoa.33 The organization's charter created a steering committee that was to be responsible for negotiating contracts with shippers. Members were prohibited from making unauthorized fruit sales and/or buying the fruit of a non-member. Annual fees and production requirements were modest.Purchase contracts, which set prices for one or more years, were generally negotiated around the first of January. Large stems of fruit (nine or more hands) fetched the highest prices. Since purchase prices were usually locked in for one or more years, growers' ability to negotiate depended in large part on the existence of competing shipping firms. Evidence indicates that even after the formation of the United Fruit Company in 1899, Honduran ports continued to be serviced—irregularly—by several different shippers. For example, in 1906 four steamship lines were making runs between Puerto Cortés and two U.S. ports (New Orleans and Mobile).A 1901 circular distributed by the Omoa-based Sociedad Bananera gives a sense of how growers tried to attract buyers. In addition to providing quarterly break downs of the previous year's production figures, the flyer exalted the quality of its members' bananas: "the fruit that has garnered the highest prices on foreign markets and that will earn a superior grade this year at the Buffalo Exposition in New York State, U.S.A., is high quality fruit, meticulously cared for, unblemished and not over-exposed to the sun. Qualities guaranteed in our fruit."34 The connection between production and marketing is firmly drawn in the circular's text. The Omoa growers were well aware that perceptions of quality were shaped not only by fruit inspectors stationed along the Honduran coastline but also by images of ideal bananas displayed in the exhibition halls of the United States.Banana growers' awareness of the need to meet quality standards helped to renew interest in railroad building along the North Coast. During the 1890s investors submitted a number of railroad-building proposals to the Honduran national government. In 1892 two planters, Floriano Havadí and Felix Quinn, received authorization to build a short railway to service banana farms in the La Ceiba area.35 One year later, José Ruíz, another prominent La Ceiba planter, proposed to build a railroad to haul bananas. In a letter to his attorney, Ruíz expressed his belief that with a rail system in place, the "quality [of bananas] will improve and we will be competitive with the others, such as Bocas del Toro [Panama] … and thereby receive better prices."36 Ruíz was keenly aware of both the competition presented by other Central American banana-producing areas and the role that railroads could play in reducing the amount of damaged fruit. However, just a few months after submitting the proposal, Ruíz's project collapsed when political unrest along the North Coast shattered the confidence of his financial backers in New Orleans.Political unrest and limited transportation infrastructure notwithstanding, banana production on the Honduran mainland increased dramatically during the final decade of the nineteenth century. In 1899 more than 1,000 producers cultivated at least 10,300 hectares of bananas in seven municipalities.37 All told, growers in Honduras produced some 3.3 million stems that year, a level of output on a par with that of Costa Rica.38 The vast majority of the production came from small-scale operations. Nearly 70 percent of the growers had fewer than 7 hectares of land in bananas.However, production scales varied significantly between municipalities. For example, nearly 50 percent of the farmers in El Paraíso and Puerto Cortés, and 75 percent of those in San Luis Colón, cultivated fewer than 4 hectares of bananas. In contrast, only 25 percent of the La Ceiba cultivators and 33 percent of those in El Porvenir and San Pedro Sula held fewer than 4 hectares in bananas. La Ceiba (26 percent), El Porvenir (21 percent) and San Pedro Sula (19 percent) also had the largest percentages of farms with more than 14 hectares of export banana production. The 28 largest banana farms occupied 1,700 hectares, or 28 percent of the 10,300 hectares planted in bananas as recorded in the 1899 survey. This suggests a noteworthy degree of economic stratification among export banana producers, one that was reflected in the widely used terms, finqueros independientes (planters) and poquiteros (smallholders). On the other hand, the 1899 data indicate that planters with large holdings neither individually nor collectively concentrated production to the extent that would be seen in the decades to come. The export banana trade in Hon-duras appears to have been dominated by men; the number of recorded finqueras and poquiteras was small. The work of cultivating bananas was similarly masculine. Prior to the late 1950s, women were seldom directly involved in the production process.39Export banana growing in Honduras then, was firmly established prior to the formation of the United Fruit Company. For smallscale growers, this era was neither a "golden age" nor a period of "disorganization." An expanding U.S. market and limited competition among shippers offered a window— however narrow and rapidly closing—through which new livelihoods could be envisioned. The unprecedented level of capital investments made by North American investors during the first third of the twentieth century led to a rapid expansion of banana cultivation and accelerated rates of agroecological change. However, the speed with which the industry consolidated following the formation of the United Fruit Company should not blur the fact that the entwined processes of social and environmental transformation were largely initiated by hundreds and perhaps thousands of poquiteros.In 1905 Honduran President General Manuel Bonilla traveled to the North Coast where he visited several banana-growing municipalities. Among those to greet the president was Salvador D'Antoni, one of the founders of Vacarro Brothers and Company (later to be incorporated as the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company). D'Antoni invited the president to see his company's banana plantations, piers and a railroad station under construction. There, Bonilla issued a statement lamenting the fact that some members of the Honduran National Congress continued to oppose awarding concessions "beneficial to the country." 40 During his first presidential term (1903–7), General Bonilla, with majority support from the Congress, granted numerous concessions to foreign investors—including the Vacarro Brothers—who in return for agreeing to build railroads received the rights to vast amounts of soil, timber, water, and mineral resources. In 1912 Bonilla returned to the presidency, this time aided by the financial backing of the Vaccaro Brothers and Samuel Zemurray, founder of the Cuyamel Fruit Company.41 Prior to his death in 1913, Bonilla authorized two key concessions to subsidiaries of the United Fruit Company and three more to the Cuyamel Fruit Company.The policy of stimulating economic development through concessions was not a novel one for Honduran heads of state; late-nineteenth-century liberal thinkers considered both foreign capital and technology—particularly railroads—to be necessary for economic growth. Echoing this sentiment in its official endorsement of a 1912 concession, the Honduran Congress declared that "the more railroads that exist, the more we will cultivate and export." And indeed, this prediction proved true; during the years 1914–18, U.S. imports of Honduran fruit increased from 8.4 million stems to 11.1 million. Export totals nearly tripled to 29 million stems in 1929, making Honduras the leading export banana producer in the world. Congressional members must have been further pleased with the banana industry's ability to attract immigrants to a region that one Honduran official referred to as "a green desert;" between 1910 and 1935 the population of the principal banana-growing departments tripled from 65,000 to nearly 200,000 persons.42The simultaneous rise in banana exports and human population was linked to the expanding presence of three U.S. entities—the Cuyamel Fruit Company, the Standard Fruit Company, and the United Fruit Company. By 1925, United Fruit's two Honduran subsidiaries, the Tela Railroad Company and the Truxillo Railroad Company, controlled some 163,000 hectares of land including 33,000 hectares in bananas and 6,000 hectares in pasture. The Standard Fruit Company and its subsidiaries controlled at least 23,000 hectares in the department of Atlántida plus 23 farms of unknown size in the neighboring department of Colón. Zemurray's companies held 22,000 hectares of land in bananas, sugar and coconuts.43 The companies also built hundreds of kilometers of railroads (the building of which swiftly became ancillary to banana production), along with piers, hospitals, work camps, commissaries, machine shops, offices, banks and factories.Throughout this period of rapid geographical expansion and vertical integration, non-company growers continued to grow and sell significant quantities of bananas to the fruit companies. Data from a government agricultural survey conducted in 1926 recorded 179 banana growers in the department of Cortés.44 Most of the growers cultivated either municipal or national lands. More than half of those surveyed cultivated 5 or fewer hectares of bananas and 75 percent had no more than 10 hectares of fruit, a strong indication that poquiteros continued to carve out livelihoods alongside company plantations. However, the survey also pointed toward growing stratification among non-company producers. In the municipality of San Pedro Sula, more than one half of the banana farms exceeded 20 hectares and the combined production area of the 16 largest planters exceeded 1,000 hectares. The term "banana grower" should be applied with some caution, since many growers, both small and large, cultivated multiple crops. For example, Cecilio Machado grew bananas, maize, rice and sugar cane on 7 hectares in Puerto Cortés; his neighbor Petronilo Aguirre raised bananas, maize and "other crops" on a farm of equal size. All told, around 70 percent of the growers listed on the 1926 survey raised at least one crop in addition to bananas.The 1926 survey data from Cortés probab