"Green havoc": Panama disease, environmental change, and labor process in the Central American banana industry

American Historical Review

Volumn 106, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 49-79

  Marquardt, Steve ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749616085     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2652224     Document Type: Article

References (260)

1. E. W. Brandes, "Banana Wilt," Phytopathology 9 (September 1919): 345, 350-51.
2. Claude W. Wardlaw, Diseases of the Banana and of the Manila Hemp Plant (London, 1935), 28.
3. A list of Panama disease-destroyed banana operations compiled by one United scientist includes Almirante, Panama, abandoned in 1926, the Truxillo Division in Honduras (1939), Limón, Costa Rica (1940), Nicaragua's entire export industry (1942), the Bananera Division in Guatemala (1955), and the Quepos Division in Costa Rica (1956). Other areas, such as Tela in Honduras and the company's Jamaican operations, also suffered heavy damage, as did Standard Fruit's Honduran plantings and British Commonwealth cultivations in the Caribbean and Belize. R. H. Stover, Fusarial Wilt (Panama Disease) of Bananas (Kew, 1962), 85 [table].
4. Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston, 1939).
5. The business historian Alfred Chandler notes that United Fruit was one of only five agricultural firms (and the only one noteworthy for its managerial innovation) on his list of the 278 largest industrial enterprises in the United States at the close of World War I. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, 1977), 346.
6. For discussions of "Fordism" in agriculture, see Martin Kenney, Linda M. Lobao, James Curry, and Richard Goe, "Agriculture in U.S. Fordism: The Integration of the Productive Consumer," in William H. Friedland, Lawrence Busch, Frederick H. Buttel, and Alan P. Rudy, eds., Towards a New Political Economy of Agriculture (Boulder, Colo., 1991), 173-88;
7. Alessandro Bonano, Lawrence Busch, William H. Friedland, Lourdes Gouvelda, and Enzo Mingione, "Introduction," From Columbus to ConAgra: The Globalization of Agriculture and Food (Lawrence, Kans., 1994), 13-14;
8. David Goodman and Michael Redclift, Refashioning Nature: Food, Ecology, and Culture (London, 1991), 99-102.
9. David Noble, "Social Choice in Machine Design: The Case of Automatically Controlled Machine Tools," in Andrew Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York, 1979), 30.
10. Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1101.
11. Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (1987; Cambridge, 1990), 6.
12. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974).
13. For historical work using Braverman's insights, see David Montgomery's seminal works on U.S. labor history, especially Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979);
14. see also Noble, "Social Choice in Machine Design."
15. "Informe de M. Quesada a la Comisión Investigadora de la Industria Bananera," November 11, 1932, Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica (hereafter, ANCR), 1727.
16. Pablo Neruda's poem "La United Fruit Co." is perhaps the most powerful literary expression of the widespread Latin American identification of UFCo with U.S. imperialism. Ben Belitt, ed., Pablo Neruda: Five Decades, a Selection (Poems, 1925-1970) (New York, 1974), 78-79.
17. Critical works by Central American scholars on United Fruit, dismissive of Panama disease, include Reinaldo Carcanholo, "Sobre la evolución de las actividades bananeras en Costa Rica," Estudios sociales centroamericanos 19 (1978): 170-71;
18. Jeffrey Casey Gaspar, Limón, 1880-1940: Un estudio de la industria bananera en Costa Rica (San José, 1979), 63;
19. Elizabeth Fonseca C., Centroamérica: Su historia (San José, 1996), 177;
20. Edelberto Torres-Rivas, History and Society in Central America, Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez, trans. (Austin, Tex., 1993), 59-66, 78.
21. For classic, still invaluable, North American critiques of United Fruit that view Panama disease as a symptom of UFCo's exhaustion of tropical soils, see Charles David Kepner and Jay Henry Soothill, The Banana Empire: A Case Study of Economic Imperialism (New York, 1935), 31-32;
22. Kepner, Social Aspects of the Banana Industry (New York, 1936), 89.
23. For contrasting views, casting United's fight against Panama disease in a heroic light, see several works by authors closely associated with or on the payroll of the company: Charles Morrow Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold: The Story of the American Banana Trade (New York, 1947), 214-303;
24. Stacy May and Galo Plaza, The United Fruit Company in Latin America (Washington, D.C., 1958), 73-94;
25. Diane K. Stanley, For the Record: The United Fruit Company's Sixty-six Years in Guatemala (Guatemala, 1994), 49-50.
26. Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 (Baton Rouge, La., 1996), 66.
27. For political histories, see Paul J. Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators: A Political History of United Fruit in Guatemala, 1899-1944 (Wilmington, Del., 1993), 166;
28. Lester D. Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880-1930 (Lexington, Ky., 1995).
29. For social and ethnic histories, see especially Philippe I. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore, Md., 1989);
30. Chomsky, West Indian Workers;
31. Thomas F. O'Brien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900-1945 (Cambridge, 1996);
32. Cindy Forster, "Reforging National Revolution: Campesino Labor Struggles in Guatemala, 1944-1954," in Aviva Chomsky and Aldo Lauria-Santiago, eds., Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean (Durham, N.C., 1998).
33. Darío A. Euraque's study of the relationship between the banana zone and the state in Honduras straddles both historiographical currents: Euraque, Reinterpreting the "Banana Republic": Region and State in Honduras, 1870-1972 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).
34. In contrast to historians' neglect of environmental factors, see a geographer's study of present-day West Indian banana cultivation: Lawrence S. Grossman, The Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Farming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean (Chapel Hill, 1998). Grossman is also attentive to labor process issues. His case study, however, is a small-farm region on the periphery of the banana industry, with relatively low production, which entered export production after the Panama disease era, and remains viable only through EU preferential tariffs. For these reasons, Grossman could not address the historical issues considered here.
35. UFCo and its corporate successors, United Brands and Chiquita, have generally maintained an aggressively secretive stance toward academics and journalists: the pressure that Chiquita recently brought to bear on one newspaper to retract its investigative reporting on Chiquita is one of many examples: "An Apology to Chiquita," Cincinnati Enquirer (June 28, 1998): 1. A striking exception was the success of anthropologist Philippe Bourgois in photocopying selections from a cache of UFCo documents he found in a warehouse in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Unfortunately for the present inquiry, this private document collection, cited hereafter as "UFCo-Bourgois Papers," primarily relates to Bourgois's research focus on relations between plantation ethnic groups.
36. Claude W. Wardlaw, Green Havoc in the Lands of the Caribbean (London, 1935).
37. For appraisals of Panama disease (by writers not associated with UFCo) that rank it with such famine-producing epidemics as wheat rust and potato blight, see Robert P. Scheffer, The Nature of Disease in Plants (Cambridge, 1997), 215;
38. N. W. Simmonds, Bananas (London, 1959), 367;
39. G. L. Carefoot and E. R. Sprott, Famine on the Wind: Man's Battle against Plant Disease (Chicago, 1967), 130.
40. Carolyn Hall, Costa Rica: A Geographical Interpretation in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Colo., 1985), 15, 25, 30-32.
41. Similar processes were at work in the other Atlantic (and a few Pacific) banana zones of Central America. Smallholders in the Bay Islands and north coast of Honduras, a high proportion of whom were of Antillean descent, with little connection with the interior of the isthmus, made similar discoveries about their alluvial and coastal soils during this period. Richard LaBarge, "A Study of United Fruit Company Operations in Isthmian America, 1946-1956" (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1960), 10-11;
42. Euraque, Reinterpreting the "Banana Republic," 24-26.
43. For surveys of the requirements and potential of large-scale banana cultivation, see William Fawcett, The Banana: Its Cultivation and Commercial Uses, 2d edn. (London, 1921);
44. Simmonds, Bananas;
45. N. W. Simmonds and R. H. Stover, Bananas, 3d edn. (London, 1987);
46. Moises Soto, Bananos: Cultivo y comercialización (San José, 1985).
47. LaBarge, "Study of United Fruit," 8-16.
48. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 259.
49. Indeed, as an effective monopoly, with substantial production on its own lands, UFCo had improved on Swift and Armour's example. Victor Cutter, United's president through most of the 1920s, explicitly looked to the meat packers as business models. Samuel Crowther, The Romance and Rise of the American Tropics (Garden City, N.Y., 1929), 226.
50. O'Brien, Revolutionary Mission, 52.
51. Casey Gaspar, Limón, 9.
52. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 48.
53. Keith originally experimented with Chinese, then Italian, workers, but neither they nor highland Costa Ricans were willing to endure exposure to yellow fever and malaria for Keith's wages. See Carmen Murillo Chaverri, Identidades de hierro y humo: La construcción del ferrocarril al Atlántico, 1870-1890 (San José, 1995), 82-88.
54. Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Baltimore, Md., 1974), 159, 186.
55. Baker's later acquisition of land for banana production did not change the smallholding character of the early Jamaican industry, as most was rented to small farmers. W. Randolph Barlett, Jr., "Lorenzo Dow Baker and the Development of the Banana Trade between Jamaica and the United States, 1881-1890" (PhD dissertation, American University, Washington, D.C., 1977), 48-50, 76-80.
56. For another study ascribing a foundational role in the international banana trade to Jamaican smallholders, see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, Md., 1992), 349-56.
57. Charles Koch, "Ethnicity and Livelihoods: A Social Geography of Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast" (PhD dissertation, University of Kansas, 1975), 123.
58. William Fawcett, "The Banana Industry in Jamaica," West Indian Bulletin, no. 3 (1902): 153-71;
59. Bulletin of the Department of Agriculture (Jamaica), new ser., 22,
60. cited in Fawcett, Banana: Its Cultivation and Uses, 56.
61. See also Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 236;
62. Jean Besson, "Agrarian Relations and Perceptions of Land in a Jamaican Peasant Village,"
63. Theo Hills, "The Caribbean Peasant Food Forest, Ecological Artistry or Random Chaos," in John Brierley and Hymie Rubenstein, eds., Small Farming and Peasant Resources in the Caribbean (Winnipeg, 1988).
64. Letter to Victor Cutter [author's name illegible], Bocas del Toro, Panama, April 19, 1916, UFCo-Bourgois Papers.
65. Samuel J. Record and Henry Kuylen, "Trees of the Lower Rio Motagua Valley, Guatemala," Tropical Woods 1 (September 1, 1926): 10.
66. See also entomologist Amelia Calvert's account of travel through reserve banana lands in Bananito, Costa Rica, in 1910. She describes them as dark, close-canopied, but open enough to walk through comfortably. Amelia Smith Calvert and Philip Powell Calvert, A Year of Costa Rican Natural History (New York, 1917), 290.
67. United Fruit Company Educational Department, The Story of the Banana (Boston, 1936), 17-18.
68. One divergence from peasant planting practice should be noted: in a concession to corporate notions of good order, the planting grid on UFCo plantations was first measured and laid out with stakes. The infusion of nutrients provided by rapidly rotting downed trees was absolutely necessary for banana cultivation: their levels in uncleared soils were quite low. For a United Fruit soil scientist's surprised reaction to this finding, see Samuel C. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, United Fruit Company Research Laboratory Bulletin No. 3 (Boston, 1918), 571.
69. See soil comparison charts for the Costa Rican Division and the Jamaican Division in Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 66-143, 424-83.
70. For Jamaica, see also Fawcett, "Banana Industry," 161.
71. The total number of Central American bananas exported increased by an average of 5.5 percent per year between 1899 and 1930. Frank Ellis, Las transnacionales del banano en Centroamérica (San José, 1983), 51.
72. On recruitment, see Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 34-35, 44.
73. The 1908 British percentage estimate is cited in Elisavinda Echeverri-Gent, "Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early Days of the Banana Industry in Costa Rica and Honduras," Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992): 285;
74. the U.S. estimate, made in 1918, is cited in Dosal, Doing Business with the Dictators, 138 n. 39.
75. While the 75 percent figure may be exaggerated (especially for 1918), scholars are in agreement on West Indian predominance before World War I. For Guatemala, in addition to Dosa;, see Forster, "Reforging National Revolution," 200.
76. For West Indians in Panama and Costa Rica, the literature is vast. See Koch, "Ethnicity and Livelihoods";
77. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work;
78. Chomsky, West Indian Workers;
79. Echeverri-Gent, "Forgotten Workers";
80. Ronald Harpelle, "The Social and Political Integration of West Indians in Costa Rica: 1930-1950," Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (1991).
81. Honduras, the latest-starting UFCo operation, probably had the lowest proportion of West Indian immigrant workers, but there, too, Jamaicans and the Caribbean-descended black workers were the core of the pre-World War I labor force. In addition to Echeverri-Gent, see Darío Euraque, "Nationalism and Mestizaje in Honduras," in Chomsky and Lauria-Santiago, Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State, 155-57.
82. Among these explanations, the relatively greater labor-market availability of Jamaicans for lowland tropical work, compared to highland Central Americans; the greater control that West Indians' relative political and social isolation as foreign workers gave the company; the "cultural familiarity" of English-speaking Protestant Jamaicans for North American managers compared to Hispanic and indigenous Central Americans. Quince Duncan and Carlos Meléndez, El Negro en Costa Rica, 8th edn. (San José, 1981), 104;
83. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 49-51, 75-76;
84. Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 51.
85. Circular del gerente no. 128, Puerto Armuelles, Panama, April 26, 1932, UFCo-Bourgois Papers.
86. Vernon W. Gooch, "Letters from a Company Traveler," Unifruitco (February 1929): 390;
87. Stanley, For the Record, 96-97. Unifruitco, the intermittently published internal magazine of the United Fruit Company, is an interesting, under-utilized source. Especially in its early years, it appears to have been a genuine channel for pooling of information and experiences among geographically separated managers and engineers. Unfortunately, issues published after its post-World War II rebirth show much greater influence from the company's famous public relations department, and should be consulted more cautiously.
88. Wardlaw, Green Havoc, 57.
89. Wilson, Empire in Green and Gold, 118. Wilson, whose work was sponsored by UFCo, is referring here to the success of United's "first banana plantings."
90. Marc Trafton, Jr., "Raising Cane and Growing Bananas," in Clyde S. Stephens, ed., Bananeros in Central America: True Stories of the Tropics (Fort Meyers, Fla., 1989), 111.
91. Crowther, Romance and Rise, 232. By the time of Crowther's and Trafton's experiences in the second half of the 1920s, many Jamaicans had left the lower ranks of the work force to return home, or to establish small farms, under circumstances to be discussed below. The Jamaican presence was thus concentrated among higher level employees such as foremen.
92. Quoted in Paula Palmer, "Wa'apin Man": La historia de la costa talamanqueña de Costa Rica, según sus protagonistas, 2d edn. (San José, 1994), 144. See also Palmer's interview with Mr. Cyril Gray, p. 121.
93. The phrase was originally coined by the early twentieth-century radical U.S. labor leader "Big Bill" Haywood, but Montgomery has used it to characterize the control that craftsmen exercised in industry before the implementation of "scientific management." David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge, 1987), 9.
94. John Stuart Erskine, "Jones," Unifruitco (August 1926): 26.
95. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 66-142, 160-238.
96. Claude W. Wardlaw and Laurence P. McGuire, "Panama Disease of Bananas: Reports on Scientific Visits to the Banana Growing Countries of the West Indies, Central and South America," Empire Marketing Board Reports, no. 20 (London, 1919), 46-47. The relatively strict plantation quarantine measures adopted by Jamaican growers may have delayed the disease's onslaught by a few years, but they did not prevent an eventual outbreak. The epidemic there did remain slower-paced than in Central America, as will be discussed below.
97. Memo from Calder to Taylor, Almirante, Panama, May 16, 1929, UFCo-Bourgois Papers.
98. Earnest Hamlin Baker, "The United Fruit Company," Fortune (March 1933): 118, 125-26, 129. The Great Depression itself seems to have had relatively little to do with this - demand and prices for bananas remained remarkably strong.
99. "The United Fruit Company first began studies on this problem [Panama disease] in 1903, and has continued them more or less steadily since then." J. R. Johnston, "General Tropical Research," Unifruitco (February 1928): 395.
100. For a rough chronology of Panama disease research, including reference to much work that remains unavailable due to the company's obsessive secrecy, see a UFCo phytopathologist's monograph published after the end of the epidemic: Stover, Fusarial Wilt.
101. The bibliography is especially helpful. For the initial discovery of Fusarium's role in Panama disease, see Brandes, "Banana Wilt," 346.
102. Stover and Simmonds, Bananas, 317.
103. The immunity of some wild Southeast Asian banana varieties suggests their coevolution with the pathogen, and hence an Asian origin, but spontaneous mutation of native Fusarium species in the Americas is also possible. Scheffer, Nature of Disease in Plants, 219.
104. For the mutual affinity of fungi and tropical environments, see Frederick L. Wellman, Tropical American Plant Disease (Neotropical Phytopathology Problems) (Metuchen, N.J., 1972), 67-70;
105. Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata, Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rainforests of Central and South America (New York, 1984), 18-19.
106. For the vulnerability of monoculture to pathogens, see Scheffer, Nature of Disease in Plants 4, 43, 144-53;
107. Helen Miller Alexander, "Spatial Heterogeneity and Disease in Natural Populations," in Michael J. Jeger, ed., Spatial Components of Plant Disease Epidemics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1989).
108. Dean's analysis can be found in Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber, 60.
109. Brandes, "Banana Wilt," 348.
110. The relationship between the development of concepts of human and agricultural health and disease is an intriguing theme that deserves more consideration than can be given here. For suggestive treatments of the former, see Esteban Rodríguez Ocaña, Por la salud de las naciones: Higiene, microbiología y medicina social (Madrid, 1992);
111. Andrew Cunningham, "Transforming the Plague: The Laboratory and the Identity of Infectious Diseases," in Cunningham and Perry Williams, eds., The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine (Cambridge, 1992).
112. Discussions of the development of phytopathology lack, unfortunately, the depth of cultural analysis to be found in medical historiography. Nonetheless, several sources point toward phytopathology's reflection of and links to the larger course of medical science. See Herbert Hice Hetzel, An Outline of the History of Phytopathology (London, 1918);
113. John Charles Walker, Plant Pathology, 3d edn. (New York, 1969), 14-46;
114. Scheffer, Nature of Disease in Plants. The latter is, intriguingly, far more influenced by ecological theory than earlier work, perhaps pointing to greater divergence in future concepts of plant and human medicine.
115. The true representativeness of Prescott's sites is, unfortunately, somewhat questionable, as some were selected by company vice-president Victor Cutter and some by managers of the respective divisions. Although some managers may well have had immediate agricultural problems in mind rather than statistical accuracy, in the absence of better data we will have to accept Prescott's judgment that the samples "probably represent in a fair way the general soil conditions of the entire division." Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, ix.
116. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 4.
117. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 3.
118. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 131-33, 592.
119. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, x.
120. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 3.
121. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 584.
122. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, vii, 584.
123. Clyde Stephens, "Bosquejo histórico del cultivo del banano en la provincia de Bocas del Toro (1880-1980)," Revista panameña de antropología, Publicaciones Especiales No. 1 (1987): 24, n.
124. Experiments with small crops of resistant musae species actually began fairly early in the course of the epidemic. Prescott's surveys, for example, list a number of plantations in which more resistant strains like "reds" or "congos" were planted in diseased areas, and Frederick Upham Adams claimed in 1914 that Cavendish species were often planted where Gros Michel failed. The varieties available at this point, however, looked very different from the Gros Michel and were not considered capable of holding their own on the U.S. market. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 184, 196;
125. Adams, Conquest of the Tropics: The Story of the Creative Enterprises Conducted by the United Fruit Company (Garden City, N.J., 1914), 32.
126. E. E. Cheeseman, "Banana Research at ICTA," Tropical Agriculture (Trinidad) 26 (July 1948): 12.
127. Quoted in Stephens, "Bosquejo," 28.
128. The cost of boxing was an issue, but orchard owners in the United States had long shipped their tree fruit in boxes, without excessive expense. See W. A. Luce, The Washington State Fruit Industry: A Brief History (Seattle, 1972), 26;
129. Al C. Bright, "Apples Galore!": The History of the Apple Industry in the Wenatchee Valley (Wenatchee, Wash., 1988), 40.
130. Much more important was the perceived inflexibility of fruit jobbers and grocers who, managers believed, would not accept a change in the fruit's unique appearance or handling characteristics. For the importance UFCo accorded market considerations, see Adams, Conquest of the Tropics, 32;
131. Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 102-03.
132. For the relationship with jobbers, see E. Baker "United Fruit Company," 125-26.
133. A. F. Butler, "Fertilizer Experiments with the Gros Michel Banana," Tropical Agriculture (Trinidad) 37 (January 1960): 31;
134. Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 45-56, 101-03. The pH-longevity correlation was valid only for the soil in its natural state - soils in which the pH had been altered showed no increased resistance. This, and the large number of exceptions to the pattern, led some company researchers to conclude that alkalinity was itself a marker of some other, unknown factor leading to resistance. One striking case in which pH did not predict survival was the Esquinas district of the Golfito Division of Costa Rica, which never succumbed to disease infestation despite relatively acid soils.
135. "The majority of lands that remain are third-class . . . Today it is not possible to create a thousand hectare plantation whose soils are not mostly third class." Viriato Espinach to Volio, February 15, 1933, Congreso 16689, ANCR, 29. See also Prescott's comments on soils of the Costa Rica Division, which he found "rather low" in lime content. Prescott, Examination of Tropical Soils, 156.
136. "Second Annual Conference of the United Fruit Company and Subsidiary Companies at Swampscott, Mass., Oct. 5-6-7, 1927," Unifruitco (November 1927): 201.
137. In the same venue, Cutter laconically characterized the new department as "rather expensive." Unfortunately, no data exist to quantify what percentage of the company's expenditures went to the Research Department over time. Nonetheless, the establishment of very large laboratory complexes in Honduras and Boston, and the maintenance of a large number of scientists to staff them, lends credence to Cutter's remark. May and Plaza claim an annual expenditure of "well over $1 million" on "fundamental research" (over and above control measures) by 1958. May and Plaza, United Fruit Company in Latin America, 153.
138. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford, 1977), 110-66;
139. Lawrence Busch, "The State of Agricultural Science and the Agricultural Science of the State," in Bonano, From Columbus to ConAgra, 74-75.
140. "Costa Rica: Agricultural Department Holds Important Meeting," Unifruitco (June 1929): 691.
141. For upper management's imprimatur on this interventionist aspect of research, see Cutter's 1927 injunction to managers: "keep fully informed and assist in the work of this department. Modern research is not dry and theoretical. It is simply a form of insurance against mistakes in future. Our mistakes in the past have cost us more than it will to maintain this department in future." Victor M. Cutter, "Introductory Address at the Second Annual Conference of the United Fruit Company, Oct. 5-7, 1927, Swampscott, Mass.," Unifruitco (October 1927): 135.
142. For claims that Research Department staff had carried out soil surveys and analyses on over 800,000 hectares in potential new expansion zones, see United Fruit Company Annual Report 29 (January 8, 1929), 3.
143. For field experimentation and monitoring, see R. M. Beasley, "Tela Has Changed in 30 Months," Unifruitco (May 1929): 620;
144. Wilson Popenoe, "Plant Performance Records," Unifruitco (May 1929): 607-09.
145. For the recruitment of managers in agricultural and engineering schools, see Gooch, "Letters from a Company Traveler," 390.
146. Wardlaw and McGuire, "Panama Disease of Bananas," 33.
147. Apparently, this unusual openness was possible because United indirectly controlled the British Caribbean banana trade, and it was thus in United's interest to cooperate on disease control measures there. There were, nonetheless, limits to this cooperation, as Wardlaw seems to have been unable to acquire complete figures for disease losses. For the unequal relationship between UFCo and Jamaican growers, see Holt, Problem of Freedom, 354-65.
148. Wardlaw, Diseases of the Banana, 55.
149. This reference work, along with Wardlaw's 1935 memoir, Green Havoc, is also based in large part on his 1928 fact-finding trip to Central America, and I cite both, along with the 1929 report, in the following pages. Despite its harsh criticism of United's cultivation practices, company managers regularly consulted Diseases of the Banana. A Honduran writer, for example, describes being referred to Wardlaw's book when he tried to discuss the problem of Panama disease with the manager of the Tela Division in 1939.
150. Pompilio Ortega, Las enfermedades del banano y cómo evitarlas (Tegucigalpa, 1946), 1.
151. Wardlaw and McGuire, "Panama Disease of Bananas," 18, 66.
152. Wardlaw and McGuire, "Panama Disease of Bananas," 46, 66.
153. Wardlaw wrote scornfully of the astonishment with which overseers in Costa Rica observed his basic soil and root evaluations: "Unless a member of the staff goes out of his way he may easily spend years on a farm without making even the most elementary botanical observations." Wardlaw, Green Havoc, 57.
154. For a comparative historical discussion of agricultural sectors in Europe and North America, emphasizing their unintegrated nature and failure until very recently to rationalize the agricultural labor process, see Goodman and Redclift, Refashioning Nature, 97-101.
155. See also William D. Heffernan and Douglas Constance, "Transnational Corporations and the Globalization of the Food System," in Bonano, From Columbus to ConAgra, 29-51.
156. Braverman's treatment of Taylorism and "scientific management" remains essential: Labor and Monopoly Capital, 85-124.
157. The ICTA team concurred in seeing labor as a barrier to disease control. See remarks on the problems posed for better cultivation by "expensive" labor: Wardlaw and McGuire, "Panama Disease of Bananas," 83.
158. R. H. Davis, "Pruning," Unifruitco (January 1927): 376;
159. H. E. Caunter, "New Pruning Methods," Unifruitco (January 1929): 339;
160. George S. Bennett, "Maintaining a Profitable Investment," Unifruitco (October 1930): 130-31.
161. Older banana workers interviewed in 1996 by the author in Golfito, Costa Rica, recall that at some time in the 1930s the "eye" of experienced workers was replaced by mechanical measuring devices in grading fruit readiness for harvest. O'Brien discusses the progressive hardening of a piecework wage regime as an aspect of the insertion of rationalistic U.S. corporate culture into the Honduran divisions, but he does not connect it with Panama disease. His argument is not inconsistent with the one presented here, since the search for solutions-to agro-ecological problems was shaped by the culture he describes. O'Brien, Revolutionary Mission, 53-54, 89-90.
162. For example, death records kept by UFCo doctors from 1917 to 1931, and organized by birthplace, indicate the direction of these ethnic tides (although they cannot, of course, accurately represent the proportions of United's living laborers). During these years, which begin well after Hispanics began to join the work force, West Indians fell from comprising nearly half of recorded deaths to less than one-fifth, while the proportion of Central American-born fatalities rose to over 80 percent. United Fruit Company Medical Department, Annual Reports, 1917-1931.
163. This method of estimating ethnic change in United's work force was first used by Aviva Chomsky, for the Limón Division only: Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 49.
164. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 180.
165. Davis, "Pruning," 376.
166. Euraque, "Nationalism," 157-63;
167. Echeverri-Gent, "Forgotten Workers," 298-307.
168. Casey Gaspar, Limón, 90-91;
169. Kepner and Soothill, Banana Empire, 172, 272.
170. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 73-84;
171. Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 48-50;
172. Ronny Viales Hurtado, "La región atlántica costarricense y el enclave bananero: Del Esplendor a la crisis, 1927-1950" (Tésis de Maestria, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, 1993), 32, 101-03;
173. Koch, "Ethnicity and Livelihoods," 163.
174. For separate observations on the slower pace of the epidemic and the smaller size of production units in Jamaica, see Kepner, Social Aspects of the Banana Industry, 100-01.
175. Noting continued smallholder production in Panama and Costa Rica, Wardlaw implicitly acknowledged the superior resistance of "a well-established peasantry": "Panama Disease of Bananas," 62.
176. For the post-epidemic agronomic consensus on this point, see Scheffer, Nature of Disease in Plants, 215, 220;
177. Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 62.
178. Although Chomsky (citing Koch's 1975 study "Ethnicity and Livelihoods") claims that peasant cultivators survived the disease by uprooting infected plants and replanting with healthy rhizomes, this is unlikely to have been effective in pathogen-rich soils: the scattered, mixed nature of smallholder cultivations was almost certainly the more important factor.
179. Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 66.
180. Unfortunately, space does not permit discussion of the impact of sigatoka on United's operations. Unlike Fusarium, the sigatoka fungus was airborne, and thus much more rapidly infectious, but ultimately controllable through heavy aerial sprays of copper sulfate solution. The most complete discussion of the disease can be found in D. S. Meredith, Banana Leaf Spot Disease (Sigatoka) Caused by Mycosphaerella musicola Leach (Kew, 1970).
181. Space permits only a sketch here of the famous Costa Rican strike of 1934 and its background. For early signs of disinvestment in plantation maintenance, see Wardlaw and McGuire, "Panama Disease of Bananas," 25, 33, 83.
182. For housing and medical conditions, see "Informe de la comisión investigadora de la industria bananera," November 11, 1932, Congreso 16358, ANCR, 144.
183. For wages and working conditions, see also Kepner, Social Aspects of the Banana Industry, 114-15.
184. For the strike itself, see Victor H. Acuña Ortega, La huelga bananera de 1934 (San José, 1984);
185. Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 244-53.
186. The Honduran strikes are relatively understudied. For preliminary treatments, see O'Brien, Revolutionary Mission, 99-104;
187. Mario Posas, Luchas del movimiento obrero hondureño (San José 1981), 76-83.
188. Wardlaw, Diseases of the Banana, 92-93.
189. Although the Depression slowed the opening of some operations, soil analyses and land acquisitions began for all of them between 1922 and 1928, the same time the company initiated its aggressive Panama-disease research program.
190. Wardlaw, Diseases of the Banana, 61;
191. Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 61.
192. R. Jensen, "Drainage and Diversion Work in Chiriqui," Unifruitco (January 1929): 3.
193. E. R. Patterson, "Transformation," Unifruitco (March 1930): 481. Patterson was a company engineer in Honduras.
194. A. J. H. Hopper, "Tropical Tractoristics," Unifruitco (December 1930): 249-51;
195. Wilson Popenoe [Director, Lancetilla Laboratory, UFCo], "Banana Culture around the Caribbean part 2," Tropical Agriculture (Trinidad) 18 (January 1937): 34;
196. "Agriculture: 1899-1949," United Fruit Company Annual Report 50 (February 20, 1950), 19-20.
197. Ana Luisa Gerdas Albertazzi, "El surgimiento del enclave bananero en el Pacífico Sur," Revista de historia (San José) 28 (July-December 1993): 153;
198. O'Brien, Revolutionary Mission, 86-92.
199. Catherine LeGrand has recently challenged the totalizing nature of United's control of the regions within which it operated, and thus questioned the distinctiveness and importance of foreign business enclaves in Latin American history. Her argument, however, is based on UFCo's Magdalena, Colombia, operations, which differed from the Central American banana zones in several important ways: Magdalena was one of only two regions (along with Jamaica) in which the company consistently deferred almost all production to private planters, it was an area of minimal UFCo activity in the post-1930s era of plantation modernization, and it remained Panama disease-free until the 1950s. Thus few of the patterns of the Central American operations established between 1926 and 1938 - the intensification of cultivation methods and work regimes, the marginalization of independent communities, and the declining role of private planters - apply to the Magdalena case. Her problematization of enclave theory is nonetheless well taken when applied to the banana industry's earlier decades, and its cultural dimension is probably relevant for the later era as well. See Catherine LeGrand, "Living in Macondo: Economy and Culture in a United Fruit Company Enclave in Colombia," in Gilbert M. Joseph, LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C., 1998), 333-68.
200. Claude W. Wardlaw, "The Banana in Central America," Tropical Agriculture (Trinidad) 18 (August 1941): 159.
201. "The Jungle's Hymn of Hate: By an Employee of the Tela Railroad Company," Unifruitco (March 1929).
202. "Banana Division: What Makes It Tick?" Unifruitco (August 1948): 3, 7. Of course, though presented here as an increase in workers' skill levels, I would argue that the new division of labor in fact represented a transferral of craft and agricultural judgment from workers to agronomists.
203. Job/wage categories rose from twenty-four in 1931 to fifty-two in 1951. Perhaps even more remarkably, only one year after being instructed to bring tasks and rates in line with the advanced Tela Division, the number of farm wage categories reported by the Costa Rica Division increased by over 50 percent: "Price List Effective July 1, 1932 (in colones)," UFCo-Bourgois Papers. See "Agricultural Department-Unit Prices Paid for Farm Work," November 17, 1931, UFCo-Bourgois Papers;
204. Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria del Banano y Similares de Quepos, "Proyecto de Convención Colectiva," March 9, 1951, Juzgado de Trabajo de Puerto Cortés, Remesa 198, Archivo 342, Archivos Judiciales de Costa Rica. It is worth noting that new cultivation technologies such as fertilizing and tillage were well under way in 1931. The task schedules of ten years earlier are not available for consultation, but would undoubtedly have been far simpler.
205. Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 84;
206. Ellis, Las transnacionales del banano, 127-28. Other divisions, like Golfito, Costa Rica, and Puerto Armuelles, Panama, suffered serious losses but remained in production.
207. Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 84.
208. For this exercise, I have used the comprehensive bibliography in UFCo scientist R. H. Stover's summary of Panama-disease research: Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 107-17. His citations for non-UFCo research show the same trend, though not so markedly.
209. For the explosion in chemical pest-control use surrounding World War II, see Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1981);
210. John H. Perkins, Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis: The Quest for New Pest Management Strategies (New York, 1982);
211. Edmond Paul Russell III, "War on Insects: Warfare, Insecticides, and Environmental Change in the United States, 1870-1945" (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993).
212. For United's pride in the success of anti-sigatoka fungicides, see Wardlaw, "Banana in Central America," 344;
213. Research Department, United Fruit Company, Problems and Progress in Banana Disease Research (Boston, 1958), 10-11. It is worth noting that without the research apparatus created to deal with Panama disease, it is unlikely that United would have found a sigatoka control method in time to forestall the devastation of its operations.
214. Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 92.
215. Kenneth M. Redmond, United Fruit Company Annual Report: 1951 52 (February 18, 1952), 7.
216. For early flood-fallow experiments, see Claude W. Wardlaw, "Control of Banana Wilt Disease," Nature 4064 (September 20, 1947): 405.
217. For total flooded hectares in the two countries, see Stover, Fusarial Wilt, 97. United flooded more limited areas of its Guatemalan divisions during the same period.
218. "Contrato para la rehabilitación de tierras en el Atlántico, suscrito con los Ministerios de Obras Públicas, Agricultura e Industrias y Economia y Hacienda, pendiente por la Asamblea Legislativa," April 9, 1953,
219. in República de Costa Rica, Compañía Bananera de Costa Rica, Chiriqui Land Company, United Fruit Company, Leyes, contratos y resoluciones relativos a las industrias de banano, abacá, cacao y palma africana oleaginosa, 1930-1953, 92.
220. See also La nación (San José) (November 18, 1952): 1, 33. Ramón Cabezas, one of United's top drainage engineers, recalls participating in extensive tests, costing "millions of dollars" throughout the abandoned Atlantic littoral of Costa Rica in the early 1950s, identifying lands that would hold water when flooded. Interview by the author with Ramón Cabezas, finca Coto 53, Costa Rica, May 11, 1996.
221. R. H. Stover, N. C. Thornton, and V. C. Dunlap, "Flood-fallowing for Eradication of Fusarium oxysporum f. cubense: Effect of Flooding on Fungus Flora of Clay Loam Soils in Ulúa Valley, Honduras," Soil Science 76 (1952): 225-38.
222. Ellis argues that rising labor costs from 1947 to 1976 were matched by rising levels of productivity, but his own evidence shows that United's labor productivity rose by only 2 percent per year from 1947 to 1961, while it achieved nearly a 10 percent per year growth rate after the end of the Gros Michel era, from 1961 to 1976. Ellis, Las transnacionales del banano, 160-61.
223. For Guatemalan banana worker militancy, see Forster "Reforging National Revolution."
224. For Costa Rica, see Carlos Abarca Vásquez, "El movimiento huelguístico en Costa Rica" (Tésis de Grado, Universidad de Costa Rica, 1978).
225. For Honduras, see Robert MacCameron, Bananas, Labor and Politics in Honduras, 1954-1963 (Syracuse, N.Y., 1983);
226. Marvin Barahona, ed., El silencio quedó atrás: Testimonios de la huelga bananera de 1954 (Tegucigalpa, 1994).
227. Bourgois suggests that Panama's relative labor quiescence can be explained by the greater degree of ethnic division within its banana work force: Ethnicity at Work, 194-212, 223-27.
228. LaBarge, "United Fruit Company Operations," 129. "Natural" disasters such as floods and windstorms also contributed to United's losses during this period.
229. Ellis, Las transnacionales del banano, 118-19.
230. H. H. V. Hord, "The Conversion of Standard Fruit Company Banana Plantations from the Gros Michel to the Giant Cavendish Variety," Tropical Agriculture (Trinidad) 43 (October 1966): 271-74;
231. Thomas L. Karnes, Tropical Enterprise: The Standard Fruit and Steamship Company in Latin America (Baton Rouge, La., 1978), 282-86.
232. Thomas P. McCann, An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit (New York, 1976), 72. (McCann was a high-level UFCo manager from the late 1950s through the late 1960s.)
233. LaBarge, "United Fruit Company Operations," 526.
234. See also Henry B. Arthur, James P. Houck, and George L. Beckford, Tropical Agribusiness Structures and Adjustments: Bananas (Boston, 1968), 149-52.
235. Seventeen years later, United's principal argument against further antitrust action was based on the "dramatic decline" of its "position as a holder and cultivator of tropical lands," following Standard's success with "varieties" in Costa Rica. "Because of the commercial success of variety bananas, the development of the box method of transporting and selling bananas, and other changes in the production situation . . . United's position in the market has sharply decreased since 1958 and the position of its competitors has improved." United Brands Corporation [UFCo's name after purchase by AMK Corporation in 1969], "Memorandum of United Brands Company with Respect to Articles VIII and IX of the Consent Judgement," March 29, 1971, U.S. Department of Justice, Anti-Trust Division, United States vs. United Fruit Co., Civil No. 4560, File 60-166-56, 24.
236. For the role of insect pest problems in changing structures of regional cotton production, see Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana, Ill., 1985), 3-22, 239-55;
237. Robert G. Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 13-73.
238. For technology and crop disease in twentieth-century industrial sugar production, see Alan Dye, Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899-1929 (Stanford, Calif., 1998), 244-45.
239. For coffee "rust" and the Latin American coffee industry, see R. H. Fulton, Coffee Rust in the Americas (St. Paul, Minn., 1984).
240. For studies of the Guatemalan coup emphasizing United's role, see Alfonso Bauer Paiz, Cómo opera el capital yanqui en Centroamérica: El caso de Guatemala (Mexico City, 1956);
241. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City, N.Y., 1982);
242. Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of
243. Piero Gleijesis, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton, N.J., 1991).
244. In addition to the many other secondary works on banana labor struggles cited above, see the country essays in Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, ed., Historia del movimiento obrero en América Latina 2: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama (Mexico City, 1985).
245. For an innovative non-agricultural synthesis of environmental history and labor process theory, see Richard A. Rajala, Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest: Production, Science, and Regulation (Vancouver, 1998).
246. For a critique of environmental studies literature along these same lines, see Richard White, "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York, 1995), 171-85.
247. See also the critiques in a special issue of the journal Antipode devoted to Cronon's environmental history classic Nature's Metropolis, especially the remarks of Phillip Sanders and Sallie Marston, who note that Cronon's landscape is "disturbingly empty of the people who performed the labor that enabled the transformation that occurred." "William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, a Symposium," Antipode 26 (April 1994): 127.
248. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy, Serge Levitsky, ed. (Chicago, 1965), chap. 7: 1, pp. 146-47.
249. Grossman, Political Ecology of Bananas, also criticizes this tendency among theorists of agricultural labor process and rural change, primarily with reference to the role of weather in agricultural systems: 211-12, 220-22.
250. For an influential, Braverman-influenced study of agricultural labor process that suffers from neglect of the natural and ecological processes underlying agricultural production, offering "an analysis of the social organization of lettuce production in identical fashion as, for example, the making of automobiles," see William H. Friedland, Amy E. Barton, and Robert J. Thomas, Manufacturing Green Gold: Capital, Labor and Technology in the Lettuce Industry (New York, 1981), 6.
251. The equation of labor troubles and natural disaster is particularly striking in United's Annual Reports of the 1950s, in which strikes, disease losses, hurricanes, and floods are often discussed within the same paragraph, as fundamentally similar factors in corporate performance.
252. See the contributions of James J. Maoris and the old Fusarium fighter R. H. Stover to a conference held at the University of Florida Tropical Research Center in Miami, August 27-30, 1989: Randy C. Ploetz, ed., Fusarial Wilt of Bananas (St. Paul, Minn., 1990).
253. Simmonds, Bananas, 372.
254. One sign of the prestige of UFCo scientists can be seen in their participation in plant disease conferences and publications, where, amid papers from government agencies, university professors, and chemical industry researchers, theirs are the only submissions representing any agricultural producer. See Norwood C. Thornton, "Introduction," and "Pesticides in Banana Culture," in Thornton, ed., Pesticides in Tropical Agriculture (Washington, D.C., 1954);
255. R. H. Stover, "Growth and Survival of Root-Disease Fungi in Soil," in C. S. Holton, G. W. Fischer, R. W. Fulton, Helen Hart, and S. E. A. McCallan, eds., Plant Pathology: Problems and Progress, 1908-1958 (Madison, Wis., 1959), 339-55;
256. E. J. Wehunt and D. I. Edwards, "Radopholus Similis and Other Nematode Species on Banana," in Grover C. Smart and V. C. Perry, Tropical Nematology (Gainesville, Fla., 1968), 1-19.
257. See also the 1970s standard text on neotropical phytopathology, written by a scientist whose early work for UFCo on Panama disease led to prominent work for governmental and non-governmental organizations on diseases in other Latin American agro-export sectors: Wellman, Tropical American Plant Disease, xix-xx.
258. Author's research in progress. For a contemporary appraisal of the respiratory damage suffered by sigatoka control workers, see Ramón Amaya Amador's famous novel Prisión verde (1949; Comayaguela, Honduras, 1993), 71-72.
259. See also "Los Trabajadores del Spray," Correo del Sur (Golfito, Costa Rica), August 1, 1945.
260. Because Costa Rica does much more than other Central American republics to monitor public health, much of the data on health effects of pesticides on banana workers comes from that country, but there is no reason to believe that workers in other producing countries are less affected. See Jorge