Empires - The American Empire – The Banana Business – more evidence - section (vii) (a)

This video and the next, looks at the US Empire and its involvement in the banana business.
There is quite a tale to be told about bananas, so allow me to tell it to you. By the end of these two videos, I would venture to say that you might never see bananas in quite the same way again.
In 1870, an American by the name of Lorenzo Baker, came across bananas growing on the island of Jamacia in the Caribbean. (Bananas actually originate from Asia. The Portuguese are responsible for bananas being grown in the Americas.) But anyway … Baker spied an opportunity and decided to start selling them to Americans.
Initially, trade was, as to be expected, rather sluggish. But funnily enough, bananas proved to be a favorite of people attending the World Fair in Philadelphia in 1876. After that, word spread and Americans quickly developed a taste for bananas. Indeed, eating bananas became something of a craze. This meant that the banana business really began to boom.
But although sales started to soar, all was not so straightforward in the banana business. Bananas are somewhat problematic products in that they are a particularly perishable. Care and attention need to be paid to their handling because they can easily get damaged. And, as everyone knows, once damaged, bananas spoil. Also, they have a relatively short shelf life which means that the producer has to get them to the consumer as fast as possible before they go bad and become inedible. So, in order to ensure the product arrives in the best possible condition, transportation from plantation to the store has to be done as quickly as possible and also, as effectively and carefully as possible, so as to avoid any damage being done. Such issues aren’t easy to overcome and inevitably add to the costs of production. Furthermore, this meant that in order to make any money, a lot of bananas had to be sold.
To meet the new rising demand, to overcome any issues in transportation and to turn a profit, two big banana companies in operation in America at the time, decided to join together to form one, big company, “The United Fruit Company”. Merging made sense, because it enabled them to achieve economies of scale as well as being better able to control the supply chain.
The new enterprise established plantations in Guatemala. Soon enough they owned a fifth of the farmable land there. Over time, they expanded their operations into different countries throughout Latin America - Costa Rica, Honduras in Central America, the coastal areas of Columbia in South America, and Cuba in the West Indies. To give you an idea of scale, according to Wikipedia, “by the 1930s, they owned 3.5 million acres of land” in Latin America.
The UFC established communities in and around the plantations. On cursory inspection, such a thing might seem not too bad, as shops were set up and people were given places to live, but looking a little harder, things could be seen somewhat differently. The workers of the UFC were not treated very we