The untold history of bananas

One night in December 1910, exiled former Honduran leader Manuel Bonilla boarded a borrowed yacht in New Orleans. Along with a group of heavily armed accomplices, he sailed to Honduras hoping to regain power by any means necessary.

Bonilla had an influential patron, the future leader of an organization infamous in Latin America known as El Pulpo, or "The Octopus" because of its enormous influence. The infamous “El Pulpo” is an American banana trading group.

Today it is officially known as United Fruit Company or Chiquita Brands International. First grown in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago, bananas arrived in the Americas in the early 16th century, where enslaved Africans grew them on plots of land next to sugar plantations.

There are many different types of bananas, most of which look nothing like the bananas sold in supermarkets today. In the 19th century, New Orleans and New England captains sailed to the Caribbean in search of coconuts and other goods.

They began experimenting with bananas, purchasing a variety called Gros Michel from Afro-Caribbean farmers in Jamaica, Cuba and Honduras. Gros Michel bananas produce large clusters of fruit with relatively thick skins, ideal for transportation.

At the end of the 19th century, bananas became a famous dish in America. They are inexpensive, available year-round, and medically approved.

When bananas became big business, American fruit companies wanted to grow their own bananas.

To secure access to land, banana barons lobbied and bribed government officials in Central America, even sponsoring coups to secure power for their allies.

In Honduras, Manuel Bonilla repaid his debt to the banana owner who financed his return to power with land concessions.

In the 1930s, the region was dominated by one company: United Fruit, which once owned more than 40 percent of Guatemala's farmland.

They cleared tropical forests in Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama to build plantations and built railways, ports and cities to house workers. Loaded by the work paid relatively high, people migrated to banana areas.

From Guatemala to Colombia from United Fruit Plantation is just an expert of Michel Bodans. These densely populated farms have little biodiversity, making them vulnerable to disease. The infrastructure connecting these vulnerable farms can spread disease quickly: Pathogens can hitchhike from farm to farm on workers' shoes, railway carriages and ships.

The same thing happened in the 1910s, when a fungus began destroying banana plantations in Gros Michel. First in Panama and then throughout Central America, it quickly spread within the same system, ensuring large profits and cheap bananas.

In the race against Panama disease, banana companies abandoned infected plantations in Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala, leaving thousands of farmers and workers unemployed.

Companies then cleared vast tracts of tropical forest to create new plantations.

After World War II, the dictatorships with which United Fruit cooperated in Guatemala and Honduras gave way to democratically elected governments calling for land reform.

In Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz tried to buy land from United Fruit and give it to landless farmers.

Arbenz government offers bid based on tax documents where United Fruit underestimated the value of the land.

El Pulpo is not satisfied. The company launched a propaganda campaign against Arbenz and turned to its extensive connections with the US government for help.

Referring to the fear of communism, the CIA organized the overthrow of Arbenets selected democracy in 1954. In the same year, at Honduras, thousands of United Fruit employees asked the strike.

Until the company agreed to recognize the new trade union. As the political and economic costs of escaping the Panama disease mounted, United Fruit finally abandoned Gros Michel. Today, bananas are no longer economically important in Central America and the United Fruit Company, renamed Chiquita, has lost influence in Latin American politics.

But the modern banana industry is not without its problems.

Cavendish bananas require frequent pesticide applications, which poses risks to farm workers and ecosystems. And although they are resistant to the specific pathogen that attacks Gros Michel bananas, Cavendish farms also lack biodiversity, making the banana trade an opportunity for another pandemic.