The Story of the Most Popular Fruit in the World: Banana
Raita Merivirta – Author, Post Doctoral Researcher
The banana was first domesticated in 8000 to 5000 BCE in New Guinea. From there it slowly spread across the tropics to the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, India, Australia and eventually even to China. In Africa, bananas originating from Southeast Asia dispersed through Madagascar to East Africa and from there to the west over some hundreds of years. Muslim merchants brought the banana from South Asia to the Middle East, North Africa, Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages. It was probably Portuguese sailors who introduced the banana to Brazil, where they brought it from West Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.. It spread from Brazil to plantations elsewhere in South and Central America and the Caribbean.
Bananas were first displayed in herbalist’s shop windows in London in 1633, where they were brought from the then recently colonised island of Bermuda, but it took more than two hundred years before the banana became a more common sight in Britain. The variety of banana mainly consumed in the Western countries today is descended from the Cavendish banana, a product of British development of a specimen imported from Mauritius in 1830. When the plant became a prize-winning success, the Duke of Devonshire in whose hothouse the plant had grown, supplied a missionary with Cavendish banana plants to be taken to Samoa. The one plant that survived the trip was used to begin the banana industry in the South Sea islands. The Cavendish banana also found its way to the Canary Islands with missionaries. The Cavendish banana became popular in the 1950s, when the fungus known as the Panama disease practically eradicated the most important banana in the world at the time, Gros Michel. Today, the same fate threatens the Cavendish banana.
In the late 1880s, the British company E.W. Fyffes & Sons began transporting bananas from the Canary Islands to Britain. With the addition of cooling equipment on ships in the early years of the twentieth century, importation of large quantities of bananas to Europe from both the Canary Islands and the Caribbean became much easier and the fruits more widely available. In the early years of the twentieth century, a Jamaica-UK banana trade link was established and soon, a newly incorporated company Elders & Fyffes Limited began shipping bananas to the UK and later from Latin American countries. The American-based United Fruit Company, founded in 1899, bought a large share of Fyffes in 1910, after which Fyffes became an even stronger player in the banana trade. With improved supplies in Central America guaranteed with the affiliation with the United Fruit Company, Fyffes monopolised the UK banana trade for some decades. Fyffes supplied bananas to other European countries as well, including Finland. Today, Fyffes bananas are grown in Central America and imported to and marketed in Europe and North America. In Europe, Fyffes is the largest importer of bananas.
In New York, consumers could first taste bananas in the early nineteenth century but the banana trade from the Caribbean to North America and Europe was a small-scale business in the hands of individual merchants for several decades. Similarly, the cultivation of bananas was the domain of smallholders in the Americas until the late nineteenth century. A change took place in the 1880s, when the appetite for bananas, which were cheap, rich in calories, hygienic because of their peels and regarded as healthy, exploded in the United States. This created a banana boom in the Caribbean and Central America and expanded the burgeoning American banana trade into a big business handled by multinational corporations. The most famous of these was the United Fruit Company founded in 1899. The company introduced Miss Chiquita, a female cartoon banana, in the 1940s. The Chiquita brand became so well known that the company changed its name to Chiquita Brands International in 1990. Today, Chiquita is a leading banana distributor in the U.S. and still wields a lot of power in many Central American countries.
The United Fruit Company came to exert enormous influence and power in Central America, especially in Guatemala and Honduras in the twentieth century. With the help of their business partners, a business partner and future head of the United Fruit Company, Sam Zemurray, organised the overthrow of the Honduran government in 1911 and instated his own man in power. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company played a role in motivating a CIA-orchestrated coup to overthrow the President of Guatemala to protect the economic interests of the company. The interference of the company and the U.S. government protecting its interest gave rise to the notion of banana republics: politically unstable small countries that are dependent on the export of one crop and therefore often controlled by foreign companies with the help of corrupt elites. The United Fruit Company acquired vast areas of land in Central America and became the area’s largest employer. Workers were employed from many ethnic and racial groups, the division of labour was racialised and the workers were pitted against each other along ethnic lines. Furthermore, the wages were often extremely low, working hours long with no days off, working conditions were poor, employment precarious and brutality not uncommon.
Today, the banana industry is still mostly run in a neocolonial manner and therefore plagued by labour and environmental crises and human rights abuses. Nonetheless, the banana trade is vital for the economies of many countries and the banana industry provides employment for almost a million workers. Fair trade bananas offer an alternative to the exploitative multinational-company-controlled free trade of bananas by using environmentally responsible farming methods and offering decent pay to the labourers for their work.
