Bananas why so cheap

They were able to acquire land in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala very cheaply, as well as securing themselves advantageous tax breaks from those countries' governments — basically authoritarian regimes in the early 20 th century when this expansion was taking place — in exchange for offering concessions such as building roads, railroads, or other improvements which were bound to benefit the growers as well as the citizenry.

Labor costs were also minimal, in part due to the growers being permitted to import underpaid labor from the West Indies. The ties between Big Banana and these Central American governments persisted throughout the 20th-century, and, in fact, United Fruit ended up serving as the de facto governing body in both Guatemala and Honduras.

This lead to both countries being known as "banana republics," as they were seen as existing primarily to ensure an ongoing supply of fruit for the American market. While the banana barons' interference is no longer so overt, they still exert considerable political influence in those developing nations where they source their product, and they continue to enjoy — and exploit — a seemingly unlimited supply of low-cost land and labor.

While there are actually hundreds of different varieties of bananas found around the world, we only see one type on the grocery store shelves: the big bright yellow Cavendish.

While the original bananas imported by United Fruit were of a type known as the Gros Michel, these bananas were stricken in the s by something called the Panama disease fungus. The gambit worked, and when the coup ended, the CIA installed a new president sympathetic to American interests. The fight with the United States that had cost him his dignity was over taxes, land, and wages.

But at its core, it was about bananas. Meanwhile, Guatemala, stripped of its leader, its dignity, and its national ambition, descended into civil war. The conflict lasted 36 years. It kept bananas plentiful, allowed supply to exceed demand, and kept the price for American consumers only marginally above zero.

Whether any of this should be relevant when you buy a banana for practically nothing is a question of the ethics of neocolonialism and the politics of exploitation. No American president has ever publicly reckoned with the cheap price of bananas and the long-ago decisions that allow them to remain so. President Bill Clinton came the closest in when he visited Guatemala, almost 50 years after his country toppled the democratically elected leader of a sovereign nation.

America "engaged in violence and widespread repression," he said. One mistake tends to beget more of them, and while the U. The decision to focus on just one banana variety, cloned millions of times, would leave not only banana farms, but the entire banana growing complex, at risk of disease. If an insect or fungus was strong enough to kill one banana tree, then little could stop it from killing them all.

All rights reserved. This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our photo community on Instagram. Follow us on Instagram at natgeoyourshot or visit us at natgeo. This is the second story in a three-part series on bananas. It is also very easy to cut down bananas, you can use one or two swipes of a machete and cut it down completely.

Which are small bulbs that form at the base of an adult banana tree. A sucker is a miniature banana tree that has roots. You simply remove the sucker from the adult tree using a spade and plant it into the ground. An adult banana tree will produce unlimited amounts of suckers. The base has a thick stem that you can drag along the ground without damaging the bananas, and makes them much lighter to move around the orchard.

This makes the harvest time dramatically easier and faster. Other fruits like apples and oranges are susceptible to bruising when you pour them onto a conveyor belt, or place them in your basket. With bananas you hold the base with one hand and with the other hand you just chop the top of the stem with a machete and let the end hit the ground.

Banana producers have easily been able to keep up with demand, and with the increasing population there will be more demand for bananas.

But, there is abundant land to grow them up, and they will continue to be very easy to grow. And yet it is fruits with this foul-tasting backstory that leading chains want us to buy. But the other supermarket chains haven't followed suit. It is only Fairtrade — the system that guarantees growers a better, stable price and pays a premium for community projects — that is keeping small co-ops of banana growers in Latin America, and further afield, in business.

In the Caribbean, for instance, distance to market, climate and topography all mean they could never compete on price with the plantation-grown crop. But although Fairtrade provides a model for a more ethical banana supply chain, the price-cutting activities of our biggest supermarkets are distorting the whole banana trade. Even Fairtrade bananas are being sold these days at the ludicrously low 68p a kilo, as a loss leader, because all bananas are now part of the ongoing price wars between chains.

Of course, supermarkets don't suffer from loss-leading strategies — they simply jack up their margins on other foods to make up for any hit they take on bananas — but as all the value is wrung out of the banana supply market, you can be sure that faceless people in faraway places will be feeling the squeeze.