Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
native fertility of virgin soil with the minimum amount of detailed treat-
ment.''
142
He argued that inadequate soil surveys resulted in the establish-
ment of banana farms in poor soils that were swiftly abandoned, leading
tothefellingof ''giantforests.''Evenonthealluvialplainsoftenconsidered
idealforbananagrowing,Wardlawnoted,soilswerebynomeansofauni-
form texture or fertility: ''Forests will often thrive on soils which, judged
from an agricultural standpoint, have a very low standard of e
ciency,
particularlyfromthephysicalandchemicalstandpoints.''
143
Poorsoilcon-
ditions tended to slow banana plant growth, which in turn provided an
opportunity for fast-growing plant species such as grasses to establish
themselves and compete with banana plants for nutrients. The resulting
increase in labor inputs (primarily weeding) drove up production costs
which, combined with poor yields and slow growth rates, lowered profit
margins and prompted the abandonment of the land.
144
Wardlaw further argued that the decision to abandon an export ba-
nanafarmwasnotameasureof ''completeinfertility''butratherofa''non-
remunerativestandardofproductiveness.''Thatis,productioncouldcease
despite the ability of a plantation to yield ''quite a considerable number
of bunches peracre.''
145
Evidence from Standard Fruit operations in Hon-
duras confirm that decisions about abandoning farms were not straight-
forward. For example, during a weekly staff meeting in 1924, a Standard
Fruit employee recommended abandoning approximately 1,000 hectares
of ''unproductivelands''becausetheynolongerannuallyyielded''60pay-
ables'' (export-quality bunches) per manzana (.69 hectares) and therefore
would not recover the costs of weeding.
146
However, a comment penned
in the margin of the meeting's minutes urged that more ''details'' be ob-
tained; in the meantime the farms were not to be abandoned because
company managers believed that ''we may need this fruit.'' This fragment
suggests that the calculus of abandonment involved more than applying
cost-benefit formulas on a farm-by-farm basis; other variables, including
the anticipated market demand for fruit and the collective ability of the
company farms to meet that demand, also affected the decision-making
process.
The fruit companies' practice of shifting plantation agriculture, then,
resulted from a production-consumption dynamic driven by the banana's
peculiar biology, the expansion of interconnected monovarietal agroeco-
systems, and mass-market structures which, having evolved around Gros
Michel bananas, resisted the introduction of Panama disease-resistant
varieties. Of course, had the fruit companies been unable to continue
to secure concessions from Central American governments ceding them
