Bananas Get Walmart-ized
Huff Post: ‘By the mid-20th century, parts of Latin America were so reliant on banana production that United Fruit and other companies wielded significant political influence in the region. “Those companies — United Fruit is sort of the most notorious — had considerable power over local governments,” said Striffler. In one of the most infamous examples, United Fruit reportedly convinced U.S. officials to engineer a coup in 1954 to overthrow a democratically elected Guatemalan leader who’d threatened to redistribute the excess land the company had let lie fallow.
‘”[Chiquita/United Fruit] has had a really nefarious history in all of the areas in which it’s operated since its creation,” Mark Moberg, a professor of anthropology at University of South Alabama, said of Chiquita. “In Latin America it is referred derisively as ‘el pulpo’ or ‘the octopus.’ Certainly nothing about this [merger] is going to improve that. I think it’s only going to allow it [to] exert greater leverage.” Today, Chiquita and its rivals exert their influence in subtler ways. Several of the major companies have deals with small, native producers, but their size and scale allow them to essentially dictate the terms of the contracts, Striffler said. Competition between the large banana companies has sometimes helped the smaller growers, according to Moberg, because it would put pressure on the Chiquitas and the Fyffes to offer farmers a better deal out of fear they would go elsewhere.
‘Now, with so few companies controlling so much of the market, the big players can dictate almost all aspects of their suppliers’ production.
‘”This is kind of like the Walmartization of the banana industry,” Moberg said.’
