The Banana

Since the pioneering scholarship of Charles Kepner in the 1930s, a voluminous body of literature has examined how that most innocuous of tropical commodities, the banana, has become associated with flagrant violations of human rights and national sovereignty. Indeed, it was in the title of Kepner’s work (1935) that the words “banana” and “empire” were first paired. Subsequent scholars have examined permutations of this theme, focusing on the ways in which three U.S.-based multinationals (foremost among them the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita) carved out monopolies over their respective spheres of production and shipping. From its founding, United Fruit (UFCO) has been the most brazen in seeking these goals through predatory pricing, bribery, military coups, ethnic manipulation of workers, and even mass murder, an actual incident lightly disguised as fictional history in García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.Chiquita continues to evidence empire building, relying now on the World Trade Organization (WTO) rather than Marine battalions to pursue its global interests. Unable to dominate European sales because of tariff-quota preferences that preserved a segment of the EU market for small-scale Caribbean farmers, in 1996 Chiquita persuaded the Clinton administration to challenge such provisions in the WTO. The result of this, widely known as the “banana wars” on both sides of the Atlantic, was a ruling that devastated tens of thousands of small farmers in the Windward Islands and Jamaica and caused an immense toll of suffering throughout the region. Among its costs are a flood of undocumented migrants, as well as illegal drugs, to the United States. Since the WTO ruling, the Caribbean has become the single greatest conduit for cocaine shipment to the United States.Wiley’s goal is to offer an overview of the global banana industry, its principal actors, and the origins of the recent banana wars. The first half of the book is devoted to the diverging histories of the “Dollar Area” banana sector (the Latin American banana industries dominated by U.S. multinationals) and the ACP sector (African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries, here exemplified by the Caribbean basin), whose growers are oriented toward European markets. While the emergence of the plantation model in Central America reflected UFCO’s monopolistic impulses, Wiley shows that small-scale production in the Caribbean was fostered by British colonial authorities for political expediency, partly to deny UFCO a monopoly over the home market and partly to provide livelihoods to otherwise impoverished West Indians. With their small landholdings scattered over hilly terrain, Caribbean farmers produce fruit at a cost far exceeding that of Central American producers. They could remain in business only through provisions that guaranteed them a generous tariff-free quota in Europe, while imposing restrictive quotas and heavy tariffs on Dollar fruit. Wiley devotes the latter half of his book to the bewildering regulations of European banana trade policy and the development and outcome of Chiquita’s challenge to them. His explication of the European Banana Protocol and the U.S.-EU trade war is exceptionally lucid, given the complexity of the issues involved. As the remnants of the Eastern Caribbean industry struggle to survive through Fair Trade certification, it would have been welcome if he had more closely examined the long-term promise of this niche market.This is perhaps the most ambitious single volume analysis of the global banana industry undertaken to date. The author has integrated a mass of hitherto disparate sources of information and has synthesized most of them accurately and evenhandedly. Unfortunately, in any undertaking of this scale, some sources will be overlooked, and analytical depth necessarily suffers in places. Conspicuously absent here is John Soluri’s superb work (Banana Cultures, 2005) demonstrating the role played by disease control, which remained in UFCO’s hands, in excluding small Central American farmers from export markets. UFCO’s manipulation of ethnic loyalties as a means of suppressing wages, as documented in Phillipe Bourgois’s powerful work on Costa Rica (Ethnicity at Work, 1989), passes unnoticed as well. Wiley’s curious statement that “Jamaica represents a rare failure on the part” of UFCO (p. 74) cannot be reconciled with Thomas C. Holt’s account (The Problem of Freedom, 1992) of how the company crushed Jamaica’s independent producers. Most surprisingly, there is no mention of Chiquita’s use of political contributions to the Clinton White House to further its interests, despite its ubiquity in other accounts of the WTO suit (e.g., T. E. Josling and T. G. Taylor, Banana Wars, 2003). It is inexplicable that such major works by scholarly presses are omitted, even while The Banana draws heavily on much less accessible gray literature and government documents.None of these caveats diminishes the contributions of this impressive volume. Wiley has done a considerable service to fellow scholars in the areas of globalization and trade by integrating a vast and seemingly ever-growing literature. For those interested in understanding the contemporary configuration of an industry that is truly global in its reach, The Banana is an excellent place to start

Commodity · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Empire · Globalization · Market economy · Political science · Sovereignty · Tariff · Theme (computing) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · Law

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