Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
company's advertising campaigns of the 1950s updated well-worn themes
that encouraged consumers to eat more bananas, or borrowed from in-
vogue modernization discourses to call attention to United Fruit's role
in bringing greater prosperity to the Americas. United Fruit's marketing
strategy would undergo a transition in the early 1960s as part of a larger
company makeover in response to a set of political, economic, and agro-
ecological changes that left the company with historically low profits at
the end of the 1950s. Not surprisingly, in the scramble to reinvent the
company's image, United Fruit executives would turn to Miss Chiquita
for help.
At the same time that the Chiquita banana song was filling the air-
waves across the United States, Panama disease continued its silent in-
vasion of export banana farms in Honduras. Between 1939 and 1948, the
Tela Railroad Company lost more than 6,700 hectares of banana farms.
The rate of abandonment accelerated over the next five years (1949-53)
when the company removed more than 9,600 hectares from production.
8
Compounding the problem of rising rates of Panama disease incidence
was the diminishing amount of prime banana soils on the North Coast. In
1946,ninefarmsoccupyingsome3,200hectaresof ''freshly-clearedjungle
land not previously cultivated'' were in ''various stages of development.''
9
Although appreciable, the new farms could not make up for land that
United Fruit had already abandoned and the prospect of obtaining for-
estedlandsinthefuturewasdim.Consequently,thecompanyincreasingly
turned its attention to areas considered marginal for export banana cul-
tivation, including extensive wetlands lying between the lower portions
of the Ulúa and Chamelecón rivers.The ''land reclamation'' projects used
an extensive series of dykes and spillways to divert the rivers' flood waters
to swamps where the silt-laden water slowed, and solid particles settled,
eventually forming a layer of soil in which Gros Michel bananas could be
planted.
10
One of the largest silting projects undertaken by the company in the
mid-1940swasa4,500-hectaresiteappropriatelynamedElPantano(''The
Swamp''). Workers erected levees—the longest of which extended almost
five miles—that were capable of holding water to a depth of twelve feet.
In 1947, workers drained the land with the aid of turbine-driven pumps
that both removed standing water and ensured that groundwater did not
rise to unacceptable levels (not an easy task in a lowland area situated be-
tween two rivers and subject to heavy rains during the wet season).
11
The
El Pantano project and others like it demonstrated United Fruit's engi-
neering prowess but also the rising inputs—and concomitant increase in
