Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the housing and medical benefits enjoyed by the company's unionized
workers.
56
For Rivera Girón, theTela Railroad Company's use of associate
growers was a clear response to the growing power of organized labor:
''When they [company management] gave the workers better wages, they
had to reduce the personnel so that their profits would remain the same,
right? They had to lay off people so that the fixed costs—the costs of
administration and labor—would be lower and employee productivity
higher.''
57
If in retrospect Rivera Girón viewed the fruit company's cutbacks as
a logical business decision, hewas less sanguine about the threat of layoffs
when he served as Governor of Cortés in the early 1960s. Following the
Tela Railroad Company's announcement that it was suspending invest-
mentsinHondurasinprotestoverproposedlandreformmeasures,Rivera
Girón complained to a U.S. o
cial that the company's action was a crude
attempt at blackmail that undermined the spirit of President John Ken-
nedy'sAllianceforProgress.GirónwasnottheonlyoneupsetwithUnited
Fruit;U.S.consulRobertAshfordreceiveda''barrageofcomplaints''from
''friendly sources,'' who expressed ''amazement'' that the U.S. government
could not more effectivelycontrol the actions of the fruit company.
58
Ulti-
mately, both land reform legislation and the associate grower program
(which meshed nicely with Alliance for Progress approaches to poverty
reduction) proceeded ahead. Entering the 1970s, United Fruit's associate
producers cultivated around 3,100 hectares of bananas in Honduras.
59
Standard Fruit began laying the groundwork for an ''Independent
Planter Program'' (IPP) in 1965. The move came one year after the San
Francisco-based Castle and Cook Corporation acquired a controlling in-
terest in the company.
60
Castle and Cook executives favored freeing up the
company's capital by finding Honduran investors to grow bananas. The
IPP bore a strong resemblance to United Fruit's associate producers pro-
gram: Standard Fruit planned to assist growers by securing bank loans,
providing technological inputs, and serving as the exclusive market out-
let. Companyo
cials predicted that the initiativewould double the com-
pany's existing acreage and create 6,000 new jobs overa two-year period.
Not surprisingly, union o
cials opposed the IPP on the grounds that the
''independent''planterswouldnotbeboundbythetermsofcollectivebar-
gaining agreements between the union and the company. Standard Fruit
ocials countered this criticism by asserting that growers would be able
to pay union wages and make a profit. However, U.S. State Department
ocials doubted this claim, noting that existing non-company growers
tended to pay about one-half the minimum wages paid by the fruit com-
