Gone Bananas!

There was a pretty cool Op-Ed in the Times recently about bananas. Not surprisingly, rising fuel costs have hurt banana distribution, and is affecting the value of publicly traded companies, like Cincinatti-based Chiquita. The Wall Street Journal attributes Chiquita's 29% dip in stock price to recent bad weather and a spike in demand for milk and meat (my guess due to the rising disposable income of people in developing countries).

Bananas, traditionally the cheapest of America's popular fruits, actually have a pretty interesting economic history.

From the NYT:

"That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas...

They became a staple only after the men who in the late 19th century founded the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita) figured out how to get bananas to American tables quickly — by clearing rainforest in Latin America, building railroads and communication networks and inventing refrigeration techniques to control ripening. The banana barons also marketed their product in ways that had never occurred to farmers or grocers before, by offering discount coupons, writing jingles and placing bananas in schoolbooks and on picture postcards. They even hired doctors to convince mothers that bananas were good for children."

The article also briefly describes the terrifying control the United Banana had over the many "banana republics" in Latin America, which kept costs low by denying many human rights to the citizens of the countries they grew bananas in. One startling example was the 1954 overthrowing of the democratically elected government of Guatemala by United Fruit. And apparantly "labor is still cheap in these countries, and growers still resort to heavy-handed tactics."

Banana companies are also able to optimize economies of scale (most notably by controlling ripening rates) by only selling one species of banana, the Cavendish. Prior to that, the only thing you could get was the Gros Michel, but a blight known as the Panama disease wiped them all out. I've written previously about the growing concern over massive food loss due to disease, and it look's like the Cavendish banana's goose is cooked. The disease, which is killing off plantations of Cavendish crops as we speak, is expected to reach Latin America (where the US gets its bananas) in the next 5-20 years.

The only thing that can probably be done is to start growing a different kind of banana - but to do that, genetic engineers must research other under-used strains of banana (of which there are many), to find a more resistant cousin. This will undoubtedly be of incredible importance to the banana industry in the coming years, although some say the big companies are not moving fast enough.

A side note, ff you're really interested, the book Banana: The Fruit That Changed The World is supposed to be pretty interesting. How silly it is the titles publishers and media-makers dream up to grab our attention. And just to seal the deal on how ridiculous this article is...here's some mildly interesting banana trivia