Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
sures to gain access to land, restrict competitors, evade taxes and duties,
holddownwages,andexpandmarketshares.Onlythemostardentapolo-
gists for the fruit companies can relegate such activities to a distant past
that has no bearing on the present. However, as this topic has demon-
strated, the fruit companies' political and economic power conditioned,
but did not determine, the historical trajectory of export banana pro-
duction in Honduras and elsewhere. Export banana farms were simulta-
neously linked to international commodity chains and a web of agroeco-
logicalrelationshipsthatconstrained,resisted,andconfoundedthepower
of the fruit companies and their allies.
Intracingthetransformationofatropicalplantintoaneverydayfood
consumed in the United States, I have tried to uncover howcultural prac-
tices and biophysical processes have shaped economic institutions (in-
cludingcorporationsandmarkets)andvice-versa.Thisframeworkreveals
the limitations of explanatory models in which capital exercises power
''globally'' and subaltern actors respond ''locally.'' Clearly, vast asymme-
tries of power existed between U.S. banana companies and the worker-
cultivators who lived on the North Coast. Nevertheless, even the United
Fruit Company had to exercise its power through people situated in spe-
cific localities stretched along a transnational commodity chain.
5
More-
over, people were not the only dynamic element with which the fruit
companies had to contend. The plants and pathogens that the companies
needed to control in order to generate profits from the production, trans-
port, and distribution of bananas were neither passive nor predictable.
Viewed from the ground level, export banana production appeared more
like a series of improvisations (both creative and destructive in nature)
than a well-scripted global power play.
Acknowledgingtheroleofcontingency,theparticularityofplace,and
the entangled agency of people, plants, and pathogens does not preclude
efforts to drawcomparisons with other regions and commodities in order
to formulate newexplanatory models capable of informing policydebates
and political projects. In this final chapter, I draw upon scholarship on
otheragriculturalcommoditiesinordertoplaceexportbananasinacom-
parative perspective. A comprehensive comparison would requirewriting
another book; my more modest endeavor selectively compares bananas
to two other important agricultural commodities in Latin American and
Caribbean histories: coffee and sugar. Fora twist, I also examine commer-
cial fruit orchards (including oranges and pears) and vineyards in Cali-
fornia in order to recast models of ''export'' agriculture by juxtaposing