Commodity Chain Paper : Banana Republic

This combined with the cultural and geographical distances (Freidberg, 2003, p. 33) has resulted in “homogenisation of the supply chain” in Africa (Freidberg, 2003, p. 34). The major vegetable suppliers are primarily large white-run farms. The author calls them “Benign dictators” (Freidberg, 2003, p. 33). These companies do not only have capacity to supply large quantities of vegetables but are also culturally similar to the supermarket buyers.

The world continues to face a wide-scale food crisis. The effects of this crisis reach from the farmers who grow and raise the food to the very system of laws that are in place to govern the system itself. Food giants are reaching deep into their pockets for lobbying in order to take advantage of both the producers and the consumer all in the name of profit. Moreover, farmers are being driven to suicide, and the ecosystem’s livelihood is treading a fine line. Both Michael Pollan and Raj Patel bring to light these problems and offer suggestions to help lessen their severity. Though there are many philosophies on which they both agree, they both have their own ideas to fight back. Pollan seeks to challenge the consumer as an individual while

If soybean production were undertaken in Tambopata, the crops would be raised under World Wildlife Federation and the Nature Conservancy’s guidelines of “Forest Friendly Soy” (Schnoecker, 2007). This means that at least eighty percent of farmers land must be preserved as forest to make up for the twenty percent farmed. The World Wildlife Federation recently awarded Paraguay with the “Leaders for a Living Planet” award in recognition of their “Zero Deforestation Law,” which prohibits the conversion of forested to agricultural

John Soluri 's Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, (Which for spatial and repetitive purposes, I will refer to as Banana Cultures for the remainder of the paper), introduces the reader to a world of corporate greed, consumption, and environmental change using the history of the common, everyday fruit, the banana. He explores the various political occurrences, health problems, and changes in mass media through the rise of the consumption of the banana in the United States, and around the globe.

We can understand the relation between commodity and trade development through the study of coffee and it’s origins. Over about 90% of coffee is produced in the South, and consumed in the North. Or a long time Latin America has provided most of the world’s coffee. Coffee comes from a cherry produced by a tree that requires a warm climate without any sudden temperature shifts or frost and it needs plenty of rain. This climate is ideal for coffee between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. During the movement of coffee from harvest to export the first step is to separate the coffee bean from the skin and the pulp of the cherry, this results in what is called “green” coffee. Before it is exported the coffee is cleaned and sorted into lots that have different quality attributes, something like the grain elevators. The lots vary as they go from country to country based on the size, the shape shape and the deficiencies it might have or the way it is processed. At this point in the process the coffee still has it’s individual quality and value.

We eat bananas almost every day; however, most of us do not really know where these fruits come from. In Banana Cultures, John Soluri focuses on the relationship between banana production in Honduras, especially in the North Coast between roughly 1870 and 1975, and banana consumption in the U. S.. He focuses on growing, protecting, transporting, and mass marketing of bananas. John Soluri integrates Agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history in order to trace the symbolic growth of the banana industry. The author admits that his work is highly interdisciplinary, as a desirable trait in the academic world. The study incorporates a wide range of sources, including manuscript census data from Honduras, fruit company records, published scientific records, Honduran and U.S government correspondence, oral testimonies, and ephemera from U.S mass culture. Throughout his work, he combines elements of geography, biology, social history, foreign affairs, and environmental history. Soluri also looks at labor practices and worker’s lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, and the effects of pesticides in the Honduran environment and people. His central argument is that United States consumption of bananas causes major social, political, and environmental change in Honduras. In addition, he looks at the banana pathogens, the ways the United States treated these fungal diseases, and the terribly detrimental effects these new treatments had on the farmers on

The Michoacan state in Mexico has become the world’s largest producer of avocadoes. Although this vegetable is grown on farms throughout this state, it is also tied to an integral network of trade and export to countries across the globe. In this essay, I will argue that like any commodity chain study, the production of the organic Hass avocado has an intricate production process, which for my commodity chain study begins in Uruapan, Mexico a town in the state of Michoacan. This analysis has indicated the crucial underlying links to trade, labour, and demand that the export of this vegetable has created throughout North America

The acai berry is a unique fruit that mostly grows in the Amazon; this limited product is wanted

focus on coffee and hereby take an approach similar to Boratav (2001) who examines terms

The author of the book, “The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World” (2008), Dan Koeppel, who is a famous journalist describes in a fascinating way banana’s cultural importance, threats associated with the crops of banana in the future and banana’ history. Banana is a very delicious fruit and is eaten all over the world. Banana is one of the world’s fourth largest harvests in the world. Dole and Chiquita are eminent American based distributors and producers of banana. They are claiming to produce the banana on low price. In this book, Koeppel discusses the risks associated to the plantation of banana around the world. He also discusses the fact that due to blight, the plantation of banana is destroyed (Koeppel, 2008). He points out that the farmers and the producers have no insight at all regarding this matter (Koeppel, 2008).

Sergio Margulis, the Lead Environmental Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean department of the World Bank, is worried about the economic damage that Amazonian agriculture may bring upon the people in the region. After performing an extensive and thorough microeconomic analysis of the area’s agricultural industry, he estimated the social costs of deforestation caused by agricultural encroachment to be approximately USD $100 annually per hectare of lost rainforest, which exceeds the potential profits to be made from agriculture (Margulis 61). Margulis, as an employee of the World Bank, is responsible for helping his organization determine the most effective and efficient method to invest capital in an effort to reduce poverty, and therefore, he has a strong incentive to find accurate economic figures in order to make the wisest recommendations on how to best help those in need. Although his research determined that agricultural expansion would yield a non-negligible economic benefit for the people, he found the drawbacks of the resulting deforestation caused by such expansion to be unjustifiably excessive from a social and economic

We eat bananas almost every day; however, most of us do not really know where these fruits come from. In Banana Cultures, John Soluri focuses on the relationship between banana production in Honduras, especially in the North Coast between roughly 1870 and 1975, and banana consumption in the U. S.. He focuses on growing, protecting, transporting, and mass marketing of bananas. John Soluri integrates Agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history in order to trace the symbolic growth of the banana industry. The author admits that his work is highly interdisciplinary, as a desirable trait in the academic world. The study incorporates a wide range of sources, including manuscript census data from Honduras, fruit company records, published scientific records, Honduran and U.S government correspondence, oral testimonies, and ephemera from U.S mass culture. Throughout his work, he combines elements of geography, biology, social history, foreign affairs, and environmental history. Soluri also looks at labor practices and worker’s lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, and the effects of pesticides in the Honduran environment and people. His central argument is that United States consumption of bananas causes major social, political, and environmental change in Honduras. In addition, he looks at the banana pathogens, the ways the United States treated these fungal diseases, and the terribly detrimental effects these new treatments had on the farmers on

Six firms dominated the banana industry in the early 1990’s, three from Europe and three from the United States. In 1994, the three United States producers, Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte, accounted for approximately 72.4% of world banana sales. Chiquita accounted for 48% of worldwide banana sales and 66.4% of banana sales of the three U.S. producers.

The United Fruit Company was founded 1899, after the takeover of the Boston Fruit Company, thus forming the largest banana company in the world (Landmeier, 1997). Through strategic business moves, immediately developed a monopoly over the rapidly expanding banana trade in Latin America. This new company had 112 miles of railroad, 212,394 acres of land, and a capital of $11,230,00 and proceeded to buy lands in Santo Domingo, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and Cuba, and increase additional acreage in Nicaragua, Jamaica, and Colombia (May and Plaza 1958, p.7) as well as exporting 16 million bunches of bananas per year. As a result of all these factors, from wealth to mass ownership of land, it is clear to see how the United Fruit Company were

Incredibly, bananas did not become commonplace in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. Many Latin American countries exported bananas to America, but Honduras was the banana exporter of the world through 1970. The popularity of bananas rose correspondingly with the monopolization of banana production in Honduras. Although, the vertical integration of banana production in Honduras was not the foundation of exportation, the gradual transition from small-scale banana farmers into geographically separated monopolies expedited the overwhelming societal and environmental shifts seen by Hondurans since the late 1800’s.