Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
than a reality: even export bananas, harvested from asexual plants with a
high degree of genetic uniformity, varied over time and space. Standard-
izing plant products was achieved through the use of disciplined laborers
and technological inputs. Ultimately, mass markets, no matter how large
and powerful, were entangled in a dynamic relationshipwith processes of
mass production.
fields of power: production and
environmental process
The most basic connection between mass markets and mass pro-
duction was a spatial one: an abundance of land in nineteenth-century
California, the Caribbean, and Latin America indirectly facilitated mass
consumption by enabling farmers to produce massive quantities of agri-
cultural products.
43
This abundance was not a fortuitous gift of nature
or what sometimes is referred to as a ''commodity lottery.'' The quan-
tity and quality of land available at the rise of the export boom resulted
primarily from historical ruptures and ecological jumblings initiated in
1492 that gave rise to what might be thought of as ''modernity's nature.''
The voyages of Columbus and his companions marked the beginnings
of the Columbian Exchange, an intercontinental transfer and mixing of
biota (including plants, animals, bacteria, and viruses) whose scope and
scale were without historical precedent.
44
The introduction of human
pathogens from Europe and Africa resulted in waves of epidemics dur-
ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that, combined with war-
fare, enslavement, and political crises, precipitated a demographic col-
lapse throughout the Americas. The effects of the Columbian Exchange
were not uniformly distributed, but by the mid-eighteenth century few
places in the Americas remained unaltered. One outcome of the pre-
cipitous decline in human population was an overall expansion of for-
est cover.
45
These new, post-Columbian forests provided nineteenth- and
twentieth-century cultivators with ''forest rents'': wealth created by re-
moving forest cover in order to gain access to soils, water, and wood fuel
that provided high, short-term yields with minimal investments of labor
and capital. As the history of the export banana industry reveals, forest
rents generated wealth not only for ''backward'' campesinos, and ''feudal''
fazendeiros, but also for ''modern'' U.S. multinational corporations.
Theabundanceof landshouldnotbeunderstoodexclusivelyinterms
ofenvironmentalprocess.Asdependencytheoristsnotedmanyyearsago,
Latin America's export economies relied on an emerging class of national
