Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
supermarkets that by 1960 accounted for about 75 percent of food sales
in the United States. That year, Standard Fruit introduced consumers to
boxed ''Cabana'' bananas.
75
United Fruit continued to growand export Gros Michel fruit through
1960, but tensions were growing between the company's research staff
and top-level management over how to resolve the Panama disease prob-
lem. In 1957 United Fruit's top scientists gathered in Palo Alto, California
to develop a long-range research agenda. The company's research direc-
tor, Dr. Jesse E. Hobson, opened the meetings by stating that ''a major
problem'' facing the company was the rising cost of production. He noted
that plant diseases were largely responsible for the trend: ''Panama dis-
ease is costing millions of dollars per year. Sigatoka is costing millions
more per year to control.''
76
In addition, the company was annuallyaban-
doning around 2,000 hectares of land throughout its far-flung tropical
operations. Flood fallowing accounted for about 50 percent of the com-
pany's Honduran production, an indication of the shrinking amount of
disease-free soils in the Sula valley.The staff scientists and consultants as-
sembled in Palo Alto concluded that United Fruit was ''running out of
land'' and that the company would no longer be able ''to avoid problems
by moving to new land.''
77
Two years later, Dr. Robert Stover, writing in
the research department's newsletter, called banana breeding ''the only
hopeful long-term approach to the solution of the banana disease prob-
lem.''
78
On a short-term basis, some company scientists believed that the
Lacatanbanana,whichthecompanywasalreadyproducinginJamaicafor
European markets, should be planted on abandoned farms.
79
However, United Fruit's top executives remained reluctant to replace
Gros Michel as late as 1959. Jesse Hobson believed that management's
lack of interest in solving the Panama disease problem could be traced to
former company president Samuel Zemurray who considered the patho-
gen to be a ''blessing'' to the company that helped to limit competition.
80
However, there is little evidence to substantiate this claim and much cir-
cumstantial evidence—including the company's long-term investments
in research on Panama disease—against it.The complacencyof Zemurray
and other ''banana men'' was more likely rooted in their perceptions of
U.S. markets. Thomas McCann, who began working for the company in
1953, recalled that ''the old-timers swore by all they held sacred that there
was just no way to replace it [Gros Michel], that anything else would be
thrown out of the markets, that nothing would grow on our plantations
except 'Big Mike.'''
81
But the banana trade familiar to the ''old timers''
had all but ceased to exist by the late 1950s. In 1952, Ecuador passed Hon-
