Landscape and livelihood: An agroecological history of export banana growing in Honduras, 1870-1975.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how diverse peoples, not-so-diverse crop plants and persistent, yet unpredictable pathogens shaped the export banana industry on the north coast of Honduras between 1870 and 1975. It employs an agroecological framework to demonstrate the reciprocal relationships between social and biological processes. I view banana plantations as dynamic, eco-social spaces connected to other places situated both within and beyond the geo-political boundaries of the nation-state. The north coast of Honduras was not a void awaiting national development, but a contested place inscribed with meanings that reflected the diverse identities and livelihoods of its inhabitants. In 1899 (the year of United Fruit's formation) more than one thousand small-scale growers in Honduras produced several million stems of export bananas. Following a series of railroad concessions to highly-capitalized, U.S. companies between 1900-1912, export banana production sky-rocketed. As biologically-diverse landscapes gave way to monocultures, an agroecosystem formed that was highly susceptible to disease epidemics, including Panama disease (Fusarium oxysporum) and Sigatoka (Mycosphaerella musicola). These pathogens did not prevent fruit production altogether, but they made it difficult to export the fruit long distances for a profit. The U.S. market's preference for the Gros Michel banana, a variety susceptible to both Panama disease and Sigatoka, combined with the banana plant's physiology and the fruit companies' access to highly-subsidized soil and water resources led to a strategy of shifting plantation agriculture in which diseased soils were abandoned in favor of previously uncultivated ones. Shifting production patterns simultaneously helped to create and eliminate livelihoods for worker/cultivators and contributed to patterns of internal migrations and public protests over the removal of infrastructure. The capital-intensive chemical control method for Sigatoka devised by United Fruit in the 1930s led to a decline in both the number and autonomy of non-company growers. By the mid-1950s, political shifts in Honduras, rising labor costs, and changes in world banana production created new contexts in which the industry had to deal with the problem of diseases. The conversion to Panama disease-resistant varieties resolved one dilemma, but led to changes in marketing and production processes that altered plantation work and exposed workers to new health risks linked to agrochemical use.