Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States - Softcover

Soluri, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0292712561 ISBN 13: 9780292712560

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2006

Synopsis

Winner, George Perkins Marsh Award for Best Book in Environmental History, American Society for Environmental History, 2007

Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States.

Beginning in the 1870s when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.

About this title

About the Author:

JOHN SOLURI is Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Review:

"This is an elegant book, well suited for classroom use, that weaves together environmental, labour and consumer histories...Soluri deftly shows that our national blinders and existing typologies have obscured as much as they have revealed. This excellent book deserves a wide readership."-Cindy Forster, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 28, No. 2, April 2009

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0292712561
• ISBN 13: 9780292712560
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336