Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
hard to discern in the marketplace due to the continued geographical ex-
pansion of production. When United Fruit vice-president George Chit-
tenden addressed the problem of declining production on the Caribbean
coast of Panama, he made no reference to Panama disease, but the two
options he presented—abandon the area or ''plant something else which
is still a banana''—clearly indicated that he was talking about the disease.
Hoping to salvage some of the company's six-million-dollar investment
in the region, the executive delivered a sales pitch of his own:
We all know about the Cavendish banana (grown in the Canary Islands
andHawaii).Itisnotverymuchofasuccess....Thereishowever,a
banana called the Lacatan which can fool most people ...wecanput
Lacatan bananas in with a cargo of Gros Michel and the chances are
about four out of five that you won't know it.
The [Lacatan] bunches are not very large. The nine [-handed
stem] is more occasional than otherwise. The intermediate stage
between green and dead ripe is not attractive to look at. Instead of a
handsome green it is a rather dull gray green. I don't care how much of
a banana expert you are or how well your taste is developed, you
cannot tell one from the other when you eat them. We can raise more
Lacatan per unit area than we can of the present banana of commerce.
If we can raise a third as many more bananas per acre, we give you a
margin on which you might very easily be able to move the Lacatan
banana. We hope you will think that over.
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Chittenden's words reveal the extent to which aesthetic sensibilities held
by distributors and wholesalers influenced the fruit company's efforts to
find a disease-resistant replacement for the Gros Michel. How the con-
ference audience responded to Chittenden's proposition is unknown, but
few jobbers were fooled when United Fruit attempted to export Lacatan
bananas three years later.
In September 1928, the Fruit Dispatch Company's Southern Division
(based in New Orleans) reported that they had received their largest ship-
ment of Lacatans to date: 15,000 bunches (the division routinely handled
250,000 bunches of Gros Michel per week). Shortly thereafter, the divi-
sionmanagerquestionedthemeritsofeventhismodestshipmentof Laca-
tan fruit:
Even those firms who are thoroughly familiar with the handling and
ripening of Lacatans do not favor this variety. The consuming public,
