LTAM 6252 Karim Nazer

Colloquium in Modern Latin American Study February 19, 2019

Professor Oscar de la Torre Book Review #2

John Soluri is an Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon. He teaches and researches

on the relationship of social and environmental changes in Latin America. In Banana Cultures, he uses

the export banana commodity to argue that “environmental changes helped transform a low-input

production process into one that was, and continue to be, both capital and labor intensive”1. He follows

the banana across an international journey that takes him through multiple academic fields including

biology, geography, and cultural, social and environmental history. His sources are wide and

incorporates manuscripts, census data, fruit company records, published papers, government

documents, oral testimonies and what he calls ephemera. The book depicts the social and

environmental transformations of the North Coast of Honduras between 1870 and 1975. It is a perfect

sequel to our previous book assignment, Warren Dean’s With Broadax and Firebrand, who presents a

study of the relationship between forest and humans2. The latter is invested in the Brazilian Atlantic

forest as the primary focus of its research and how the interaction with humans shaped and ultimately

destroyed the original forest. In Soluri’s book, he uses the export banana commodity to illustrate how

its evolution in the 19th and 20th centuries, defined its production in Honduras and its consumption in

the United States. Unlike previous scholars, who debated around the concepts of capital and

technology to enable the efficient and optimal use of natural resources, he insists in reinserting

agriculture back into the banana plantation. Despite their different approaches, they both ultimately

explore the complex connections between environment and humans and how they transformed the

landscape of a region/nation and the lives of its people.

1
John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Changes in Honduras and the United States
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 3. https://muse-jhu-edu.librarylink.uncc.edu/book/3117
2
Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand, The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: University of California Press, 1995), 10.
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LTAM 6252 Karim Nazer
Colloquium in Modern Latin American Study February 19, 2019
Professor Oscar de la Torre Book Review #2

According to Soluri, prior to the first half of the 19th century, few people in the U.S. had tasted

a banana. Conversely, by the end of the 1800s, banana consumption witnessed a rise sharp

that transcended gender, class, race and region3. The expansion of banana exports made Honduras the

leading exporter between 18702 and 1975 and it transformed this fruit from a mundane dietary staple

into oro verde4.

Professor Soluri states that banana plants are both biological organisms and cultural artifacts

whose history in Latin America can be traced back four hundred years, as a self-propagating, high

yielding plant that suited the needs of slaves and required little input to transform into food5.

According to Soluri, by the 1870s, schooners from U.S. ports began to arrive with frequency to

purchase bananas and coconuts from Honduras. The Agrarian Law of 1877, he continues, provided tax

and financial incentives for cultivators to grow crops for international markets6. According to the

author, banana’s biology made possible a comparatively quick and steady return on both capital and

labor investments and by 1899, its production reached such a large scale that the government decided

to survey existing farms7 with 85% of them measuring less than 15 hectares. At this junction and

according to Soluri, the evidence suggest that large-scale farms did not dominate production and that

labor was harder to come by than land8 and the production zones prospered near port cities, navigable

inland water ways or the national railroad9. In 1905, he continues, multiple companies gained

government concessions to build railroads and acquired farms along those routes which led to three

companies controlling the production, transportation and distribution of bananas10.

3
Soluri, 1.
4
Soluri, 2.
5
Soluri, 5.
6
Soluri, 19.
7
Soluri, 22.
8
Soluri, 23.
9
Soluri, 27.
10
Soluri, 33.
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LTAM 6252 Karim Nazer
Colloquium in Modern Latin American Study February 19, 2019
Professor Oscar de la Torre Book Review #2

The rise in U.S. banana consumption, states Professor Soluri, coincided with the diffusion of

steamships and locomotives capable of transporting perishable commodities great distances at greater

speed11. By the 1890s, he says, the majority of the bananas reaching U.S. markets was the yellow

variety known as the Gross Michel fruit. He then introduces Andrew Preston from the Boston fruit

Company, who in 1890 wrote about the importance of integrating production, shipping and marketing

to create a company that could better manage quantity and quality and not surprisingly who was

instrumental in 1899 to the formation of the United Fruit Company12.

The expansion of banana farms in the 20th century, according to Soluri, transformed ecosystems

characterized by a high diversity of plants and low population densities of individual species into an

agroecosystem of monocultures of extremely limited diversity13. In this context, he continues, the

panama disease can be thought as a secondary invader that followed the wide ecological swath cut of

expanding Gross Michel production. By 1929, Banana export represented 3.3% of U.S. imports and

more than 50% of all imports from Central America14 and more than 50% of U.S. households

consumed it.

Professor Soluri then addresses the practice of shifting plantation agriculture as the result of a

production-consumption dynamic driven by the banana’s biology, the expansion of inter-connected

monovarietal agroecosystems and mass-market structures that revolved around Gross Michel

monoculture15.

By the early 1940s, discusses Soluri, the process and organization of export banana production

had changed drastically: small and medium scale-growers all but disappeared and the spread of

11
Soluri, 37.
12
Soluri, 40.
13
Soluri, 54.
14
Soluri, 62.
15
Soluri, 72.
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LTAM 6252 Karim Nazer
Colloquium in Modern Latin American Study February 19, 2019
Professor Oscar de la Torre Book Review #2

panama and sigatoka diseases favored large-scale producers with capital reserves and high yielding

soils16. The transformation of the North Coast landscape, he continues, resulted from the labor of

thousands of people. Finding a. job, the author states, was not difficult, holding onto one was near

impossible because most farm work was done on a short-term contractual basis and cyclical, structural

and mass layoffs were common practice due to economic downturns, production calendar, shipping

restrictions or spread of plant pathogens17.

In the final chapter, Professor Soluri discusses, how fruit companies’ political and economic

power conditioned, but did not determined, the history of export banana in Honduras and elsewhere

and how export banana farms were linked to international commodity chains and a web of

agroecological relationships, According to Soluri, it is not just that capital exercises power globally as

human agency, but plants and pathogens play a pivotal role in this process18.

In his concluding remarks, the author explores new ideas on how to look at commodities in

Latin America and elsewhere. He says that unlike coffee and sugar who historically were highly

processed commodities in ways that radically changed their appearance and flavor, bananas and

oranges needed only needed minimal processing prior to shipping19. He says that most basic

connection between mass markets and mass production was spatial: an abundance of land in 19th

century California, Caribbean and Latin America facilitated mass consumption and provided farmers

with a temporary comparative advantage to produce massive quantities of agricultural products20.

16
Soluri, 116.
17
Soluri, 137.
18
Soluri, 217.
19
Soluri, 226.
20
Soluri, 232-233.
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