"Green Havoc": Panama Disease, environmental change, and labor process in the Central American banana industry

• Authors : Marquardt, S.


• Document type : Journal article


• Year of publication : 2001


• Journal title : American Historical Review


• Volume (number) : 106 (1)




• Pages : 49-80


• Peer-reviewed : Yes


• ISSN : 0002-8762


• Language(s) : English


• Abstract : The real protagonist of this narrative is Fusarium oxysporum f. cubense. The microscopic causal organism of Panama disease, humbled a multinational corporate giant whose economic, social, and political powers remain legendary in the Western Hemisphere. The company's search for a formula to achieve plantation "resistance" to Panama disease led to fundamental change in the organization and labor processes of banana production. United's management shared, for a time, its detractors' belief that "backward" and "wasteful" agricultural practices (the result, managers believed, of excessive reliance on the peasant techniques of plantation workers) were responsible for the epidemic. But their effort to respond by revolutionizing the industry's systems of production did not follow the wishes of nationalist critics but, rather, the logic of corporate rationality and managerial control. The company's ultimate inability to defeat the disease indicates the ironic, ecological limits of that logic.


• Keywords : MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS; HISTORY; EPIDEMICS; GROS MICHEL AAA; COSTA RICA; FUSARIUM WILT


• Open access : No


• Document on publisher's site : View article on publisher's site


• Musalit document ID : IN040022

If you want to link this record, use this url : musalit.org/seeMore.php?id=8010