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Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas. Edited by Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. viii + 364 pp. Index, notes, bibliography, illustrations, maps, photographs, tables. Cloth, $79.95; paper, $22.95. ISBN: cloth, 0-822-33159-4; paper, 0-822-33196-9.
Bananas do not grow on trees, but they are one of the world's oldest domesticated food crops and its fourth most important staple. If all the bananas grown in the world every year were placed end to end, they would circle the earth two thousand times. Only rice, wheat, and maize feed more people. The world's most popular fruit falls into two categories. Ordinary bananas represent 90 percent of the bananas produced on our planet. However, the most frequently told story on the subject is that of the dessert banana, which is grown strictly for export to Europe and North America, accounting for 10 percent of global production. The Cavendish banana and its predecessor, the Gros Michel, fall into this category, and the chronicle of how these fruits revolutionized the agro-export industry is the subject of Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas. The Cavendish banana represents about 99 percent of the bananas sold in Europe and North America, where the average person consumes fourteen kilos of bananas per year. The fruit is such an important part of the North American diet that, in an average supermarket, bananas account for 10 to 13 percent of all the sales in the produce section and 1 percent of total sales. What's more, an astonishing 83 percent of the bananas that make it to European and North American markets are grown in Latin America and the Caribbean.
As students of the region know, the evolution of the common banana into a major agricultural commodity parallels the rise of the United States as an industrial power. In the nineteenth century, the banana was a common kitchen crop in the tropical world. This began to change in the 18905, and by 1920, the market was expanding to the United States and bananas were beginning to be identified as an "American" fruit. Today the banana industry is a billion-dollar industry, and bananas are the fifth-largest agricultural commodity in world trade. The success of the industry depends on the...