Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
By that point, the company had almost completely abandoned its
farmswestofLaCeiba.
130
Duringthethree-monthperiodofpeakdemand
in 1932, only 13% of Standard's exports (1.5 million bunches) came from
farms situated in Atlántida.
131
Three years later, the department's gover-
nor reported that Standard had not undertaken any new projects in his
jurisdiction due to the ''impossibility'' of combating Panama disease.
132
Around this same time, Standard Fruit agreed to turn over some 25,000
hectares of abandoned land in Atlántida to the national government.
133
A similar process unfolded elsewhere along the North Coast. By 1930,
at least fourteen farms belonging to the Tela Railroad Company had been
or were soon to be abandoned. Two years later, the company ceased pro-
duction in the Leán valley.
134
In Colón, the Truxillo Railroad Company
abandoned nearly 10,000 hectares during the 1920s.
135
In1928,aHon-
duran o
cial reported that Panama disease was damaging ''the majority
of farms, but principally those located along the Mosquitia line.''
136
In
1937, only ten years after production began in the Black River valley, the
Honduran National Congress, noting ''the intense development of some
diseases that have caused the complete ruin of the company's bananas,''
approved a decree giving the company the right to abandon the region.
137
As part of the agreement, the company returned at least 17,000 hectares
of land to the state. By 1940, the Truxillo Railroad Company's activi-
ties in Colón had all but ceased; observers noted that sun-tolerant plant
species quickly inhabited the spaces once occupied by banana plants.
138
Finally, in Puerto Cortés, a U.S. consular report from 1927 stated that the
''banana disease'' continued to attack new plantings of Gros Michel, re-
ducingtheoutputfromCuyamelFruitCompanyfarmsto''analmostneg-
ligible quantity.''
139
Following his 1931 inspection of the Omoa-Cuyamel
region, Honduran o
cial Alonzo Valenzuela contrasted his memories of
banana-covered valleys to the guamil-dominated landscape that he ob-
served where banana plants were ''seldom found.''
140
By 1930, Zemurray's
subsidiaries had abandoned more than 10,000 hectares.
141
As the export
boom came to a close, Gros Michel ''graveyards'' littered the North Coast
from the Guatemalan border to Mosquitia.
The geographical instability of export banana production cannot be
attributedexclusivelytothespreadof Panamadisease.Contemporaryob-
servers tended to attribute abandonments to multiple causes, including
decliningsoilfertility.Followinghis1927tourofCentralAmericanexport
banana zones, British researcher Claude Wardlaw criticized the cultiva-
tionpracticesheobservedthereaslittlemorethan''theexploitationofthe
