Americans love bananas.
We eat more of them than any other fruit.
We even bicker about the proper way to eat them.
It's not brown.
Yes, what is that color?
Oh, that crunch right there.
This banana did the same thing!
No.
Basically, we've gone bananas for bananas.
Specifically, we like this banana: the Cavendish.
There are hundreds of varieties of bananas, but the
Cavendish is the only one widely available in the U.S.
In 2018 alone, the U.S.
imported about 2.2
billion dollars worth of the Cavendish, or about 10.5
billion pounds.
But there's a problem.
A deadly fungus that targets the Cavendish is spreading around the world.
The fungus and the disease it causes go by a few
names, most often Tropical Race 4 or TR4 and Panama disease.
But whatever you call it, the result is the same. The
fungus actually infects through the roots, gets into
what's known as the corm, which is the big bulb at the
bottom, and then gets into the vascular tissue.
The first symptom is usually a very characteristic
yellow leaf, just one leaf.
Very quickly after that, the plant dies.
Bang.
Bang indeed.
It hasn't yet arrived in Latin America, the region that supplies the U.S.
with 97 percent of its bananas.
But experts agree that it's only a matter of time.
It has spread across oceans, two continents.
And, if you look at them ap, it's coming to Latin America. There's no question about that.
All it takes is one person to transfer this on their
shoes, and then we've got an epidemic and it's going
to sweep through the American production system like fire.
This is troubling news for banana fans and for the
three American companies that dominate global banana
sales. As of each company's most recent public filing,
bananas comprised significant portions of their sales.
But the worst part?
We can't stop it.
We know this because Panama disease has already
destroyed the banana industry once before.
Bananas are, like, the most boring, mundane objects on
Earth. Like, it's just a banana.
This is Dan Koeppel, author of this book about
bananas. Yet behind the banana is this amazing,
fascinating history.
It's like science, it's culture, it's it's bloodshed,
it's murder, it's music, it's everything.
We'll get to all that.
But let's start here.
U.S. imports the second largest number of bananas,
behind the European Union.
But banana agriculture barely exists in either place:
a dwindling amount in Hawaii and a moderate amount in the Canary Islands.
To understand bananas improbable domination, we have to go back to the beginning.
Bananas were first cultivated here on this tiny island 3000 years ago.
They migrated with humans across Asia, the Middle
East, and Africa, becoming a staple everywhere they
went. Arabic and European scholars even bickered over
whether the famous fruit that tempted Eve was not an
apple, but a banana.
Bananas arrived in the Americas in 1516, when a
Spanish priest brought them from the Canary Islands to the Dominican Republic.
From there, they spread throughout the rest of the Caribbean.
Bananas are fragile and rot within a week of being picked.
In the early half of the 19th century, the small
amount that managed to make it to the U.S.
were sold as an expensive luxury food.
But after the Civil War, bananas became a huge craze.
Between 1871 and 1901, the value of the bananas
imported to the U.S.
increased from $250,000 to $6.5 million.
And in the 10 years after that, U.S.
consumption of bananas nearly tripled from 15 million
to 40 million bunches.
So many banana ships arrived at these docks on
Manhattan's Lower East Side that they became known as the 'banana docks'.
This shift is thanks to these three entrepreneurs.
By 1899, they had formed a banana importing business called United Fruit Company.
That might not sound familiar, but its modern name
will: Chiquita.
But back then, it was United Fruit and it was huge.
So huge that it gained the nickname 'El Pulpo,' or
'the octopus,' for the stranglehold it developed on
Central America.
So huge that the U.S.
government repeatedly brought antitrust action against
it. So huge that understanding bananas in the first
half of the 20th century means understanding United
Fruit.
United Fruit's business model relied on economies of
scale.
I mean the banana really is an impossible export fruit.
I mean, it's fragile, it ripens quickly, it gets
rotten fast.
And the way to do it is to make it so cheap that your
money is made on volume.
Keeping the retail price low meant keeping the costs to
produce those bananas very low.
But transporting a delicate tropical fruit across
thick jungles or hurricane-stricken oceans was not a
recipe for rock-bottom production costs.
United Fruit managed this by tightly controlling every
aspect of the supply chain.
First, United Fruit acquired huge swaths of land in
Latin America.
In exchange, they constructed railroads and telegraph
lines — infrastructure that locals could use, but that
remained under company control.
During the heyday of its operations, it was generally
the largest landowner in any of these countries.
At one point, it controlled almost 20 percent of
all arable land in Guatemala for example.
Second, United Fruit squashed competition with price
wars or buyouts, becoming a virtual monopoly by the
early 20th century.
The U.S.
government brought antitrust lawsuits against United
Fruit multiple times.
In 1909, the government forced the company to sell the
50 percent of shares it owned of one of its last
remaining competitors.
The company's previous owners regained control and
later renamed their business Standard Fruit.
Remember that name.
It later became Dole.
But the most controversial aspect of United Foods
early history was its treatment of local plantation
workers.
In order to produce bananas very profitably, you have
to keep the wages extremely low.
And so the plantations historically have resorted to
extremely repressive labor conditions in order to
suppress wages.
Workers often protested these conditions, but United
Fruit took drastic measures to squash rebellion.
Measures that often involved military action, either
from local governments or from the U.S.
itself. In 1928, workers from United Fruit plantations
in Colombia went on strike.
United Fruit encouraged the government of Colombia to
suppress the strike.
That December, the workers were told they could meet
with the regional governor in the town square to
discuss their demands.
Instead, the Colombian army mounted machine gun nests
in all the surrounding buildings and gunned down, it's
estimated, up to 3000 civilians in cold blood,
including many women and children and elderly people.
And so the national governments were the ones who were
mainly involved in the suppression of strikes, but
they were acting very much at the behest of United
Fruit.
And when local governments couldn't or wouldn't step
in, the U.S.
itself did.
[Newscaster] Dateline Nicaragua, 1926.
In a moment, the story
The U.S.
Marines landed repeatedly in Central America.
The U.S.
government was determined to prevent any sort of
communism from taking hold in the Americas.
When banana workers on United Fruit plantations
protested for unions or rights, it raised fears of
Communism. Fears that many historians argue were more
of a convenient excuse than a legitimate threat.
The accusation always flung at union organizers or
human rights activists was that they were acting under
communist auspices.
It was a very convenient way of dismissing those
movements and rationalizing extreme political and
military measures against them.
They sort of lost sight of the fact that they were a
banana company and not sort of the political
communications arm of the anti-Communist campaign.
I mean, it sounds crazy but it's really true.
Perhaps the most notorious example is that of Jacobo
Árbenz. In 1950, Árbenz won the presidency in
Guatemala on a promise to redistribute unused United
Fruit land to poor Guatemalans.
The company sounded the alarm, which quickly reached
the White House thanks to a few well-placed company
executives.
Allen Dulles, who was a lawyer who worked for United
Fruit and a board member of United Fruit, was the
brother of John Foster Dulles, who was the secretary
of state in the Eisenhower administration.
And so when United Fruit perceived its interests to be
threatened in Guatemala, there was a direct
communication of that threat from United Fruit's
managers on the ground in Guatemala to Allen
Dulles, in turn to his brother, in turn to President
Eisenhower, who then directed the CIA to lead a
disinformation and destabilization campaign against
Árbenz — one which resulted in his being overthrown
and exiled and which ushered in literally two
generations of military governments, extremely
repressive governments in Guatemala.
United Fruit called this a 'decidedly favorable
development' in its 1954 annual report.
Chiquita declined to comment on these allegations.
However, in 2001, the company released a corporate
social responsibility report that acknowledged
allegations of the company's participation in the
Árbenz coup and other events.
They noted that 'this casts a shadow even today over
the company,' but that 'times have changed and so has
our company.'
If this seems like a lot of work for bananas, that's
because it was.
But back in the U.S., they
were becoming an extremely popular snack.
The American public was largely unaware of United
Fruit's tactics abroad.
But at home, they fell in love with bananas thanks to
the company's extensive advertising efforts.
To name just a few: in 1924, the company added coupons
for bananas to boxes of cornflakes to encourage
consumers to eat the fruit with cereal.
In 1939, the company distributed free textbooks to
grade schools filled, of course, with information on
bananas. In 1944, they unveiled their most iconic
marketing success.
Miss Chiquita.
The big question is why.
Like, Andrew Preston, the founder of United Fruit,
what made him think this like easily rotten, expensive
to ship, weird-looking fruit could be sold for almost
nothing to people who didn't know what it was, how to
eat it?
That weird-looking fruit was gold for United Fruit.
In 1920, the company had net profits of 33 million
dollars, or about 419 million in 2019 dollars.
I mean, it was just just a miracle.
A miracle that was bought obviously in blood and
horror. But it was absolute marketing genius, there's
no question about it.
In short, bananas kicked off lawsuits, advertising
innovations, protests, coups, and violent suppression.
But these bananas were not today's Cavendish.
These are Gros Michel bananas, a related species that
is bigger and tougher than the Cavendish and with a
slightly different taste.
They're also the first banana rendered commercially
extinct by Panama disease.
Before we get into that, some science.
Gros Michel bananas were all genetically identical.
The same is true of today's Cavendish, which is why
bananas look the same no matter where you buy them.
Business-wise, identical products are good.
Companies can standardize transport systems and
cultivate loyalty and trust among consumers.
But biologically, they're bad.
Monoculture is is always an issue in agriculture.
The problem is that if you're growing all the same
material, all of these are going to be susceptible to
the same disease.
So when the deadly fungus first appeared in Panama in
1903, it made short work of United and Standard Fruit's products.
Over the next 57 years, Panama disease wiped out
virtually every Gros Michel plantation in Latin
America. Both Standard and United Fruit knew of the
disease since the early 1900s, but they dealt with it
differently. United Fruit clung to the Gros Michel,
hoping it could outrun the disease by starting new
plantations on fresh land.
Demand for bananas was skyrocketing, but the ability to
grow bananas in South and Central America was
declining. The disease was actually creating this
avaricious need for land.
That method only worked for so long.
By the early 1920s, banana shortages were such a
noticeable problem that musicians Frank Silver and
Irving Cohn wrote this hit song, in which a fruit
stand vendor repeatedly informs his customers that he's out of bananas.
By the 1950s, the Gros Michel's future looked grim.
Even the strategy of stealing land as the disease was
chasing was, was running out of gas because there was
not enough land to meet the demand for bananas.
United Fruit went into freefall.
From 1950 to 1960, annual revenue fell from 66 million
to 2.1 million. Meanwhile, Standard Fruit couldn't afford to
constantly buy new land.
So in the late 1920s, it began searching for a banana
with the taste, look, and resistance to Panama disease
to replace the dying Gros Michel.
It eventually landed on, you guessed it, the
Cavendish.
Standard Fruit grew the first commercial Cavendish in
1953 on a plantation in Honduras.
It spent the rest of the decade figuring out how to
transport them.
Cavendish is very fragile.
Gros Michel was never shipped in boxes, it was just
thrown in bunches into ships.
But by boxing them and using gas to preserve it, to
keep their ripening in check, they were able to ship
this and grow them at low prices.
This put Standard Fruit leagues ahead of United Fruit
when the latter finally adopted the Cavendish in the
early 1960s.
In that time, just that 10-year span, Standard Fruit,
which became Dole, had managed to get a 50 percent
market share.
So Chiquita never really recovered, to this day.
Other than Chiquita's decline, the switch to the
Cavendish went smoothly enough.
Nearly 60 years later, most Americans happily consume
the Cavendish, unaware of its lost predecessor.
For the next few decades, the industry hummed along
much as it had before, just with a different banana.
Standard Fruit became Dole and United Fruit became
Chiquita. Together with Del Monte and the Irish-based
company Fyffes, they dominated global banana exports,
controlling two-thirds in the 1980s.
But the many problems faced by banana workers
continued, more than can be detailed here.
Notably, in 2007 Chiquita admitted to paying a violent
Colombian terrorist group to protect its banana workers from 1997 to 2004.
And in the mid-1990s, Chiquita kicked off a trade war
with the European Union over its legislation that
favored bananas from former EU colonies.
Chiquita lobbied the U.S.
government to file a complaint with the newly-formed World Trade Organization.
The ensuing trade war, called 'the worst
trans-Atlantic economic dispute since World War Two'
by a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, dragged on until 2012.
Even with all this, nothing changed for American
consumers. Bananas reliably appeared on supermarket
shelves around the nation for dirt-cheap prices — an
average of about 55 cents per pound since 2000.
But this brings us back to the beginning of this video: Panama disease.
In the 1980s, the banana industry's old foe reappeared.
Banana biologist Randy Ploetz first identified it in the early 1990s.
Basically, what started this whole thing going was that
there was a mindset in Southeast Asia, In Indonesia
in particular, in Malaysia, that they can make money
growing these huge monocultures
of Cavendish for the first time.
When they first started doing this, they
started succumbing to Fusarium Wilt.
It was like, whoa, what's going on there?
The strain of the fungus that wiped out the Gros Michel
was called Tropical Race 1, or TR1.
Cavendish is immune to that.
But it isn't immune to a different strain of the same
fungus: Tropical Race 4, or TR4.
Think of them like different strains of the flu.
It was very much a surprise.
People thought Panama disease would not be a problem
on Cavendish anymore, and lo and behold it is.
Quarantine efforts contained the fungus in Southeast
Asia for a while, but it soon spread.
Historically, this has never been a really great strategy.
I mean if you've ever been to a banana plantation,
there's thousands of vehicles going in and out all day
long. There's there's no effective quarantine method
that we've ever seen that really works.
For now, Latin America is safe.
It's oceans away from the fungus.
But experts agree that the fungus' arrival is a matter of when, not if.
Hopefully it'll take many, many years but it could happen tomorrow.
There's no way to really put a timeline on this.
Part of the danger is due to how the industry has
changed. The giant, corporate-owned banana plantations
of the Gros Michel era have been replaced by many more
exporters operating on much smaller plots of land.
In Ecuador, for instance, the number of registered
banana exporters jumped from 181 in 2011 to 333 in 2012.
Experts worry that the logistics of implementing
protective measures across so many plantations will
allow Panama disease to spread rapidly.
It's very difficult to make a thousand different family
farms do clean farming compared to one big factory farm.
I think what's possible is that someone's going to get
it in their field and they're going to keep it a
secret and not let people know.
And that would be a disaster. Because once it gets in
the waterways, in the soil, that sort of thing, it
spreads in kind of an insidious manner.
And this time, there's no readily available
replacement. No known banana has the correct taste or durability.
They dodged the bullet in the 1950s by identifying a variety, Cavendish.
I think if there was something out there, they would've found it by now.
I know they've put a lot of effort into screening
material and looking at material and so far they don't have a replacement.
Even if they did, the entire infrastructure network for
transporting bananas would have to be replaced once again.
The entire banana supply chain, from the moment the
plantlet is planted in the ground to the moment you
start to peel it, is designed just for the Cavendish
banana. It's almost as though a Cavendish-shaped pipe
from Central America comes to your house and it
doesn't really fit another banana.
This could explain why, until recently the big three
banana companies seemed unwilling to recognize the problem.
I think they're still not quite cognizant of the fact
that they've got the same problem happening again.
CNBC reached out to Dole, Fresh Del Monte, and Chiquita for comment.
A Fresh Del Montespokesperson wrote that:
A Dole spokesperson wrote:
Chiquita declinedto comment.
Breeding a Panama resistant Cavendish, traditionally or
by genetic modification, is likely the best hope for the banana's future.
But each has their drawbacks.
Traditional cross-breeding of Cavendish bananas is difficult because of their tiny seeds.
People have been selecting bananas for thousands and
thousands of years based on seedlessness.
No one particularly wants seeds in their bananas.
And now we have some residual fertility in it, but
it's very difficult to produce seeds in bananas.
Genetically modifying bananas has proven more
successful. In 2015, Australian researcher James Dale
engineered a Panama-resistant Cavendish banana.
We've taken a resistance gene from a wild banana that
occurs in Southeast Asia and is naturally resistant to Tropical Race 4.
We've moved that gene into Cavendish.
That's how we've generated resistance.
But any genetically-modified banana will face strong
resistance from anti-GMO groups in both the U.S. and the EU.
But the Cavendish is more important, both for global
economies and food security, than the Gros Michel ever was.
In 2013, the World Banana Forum under the United
Nations created a task force specifically to combat Panama disease.
And demand continues to rise.
From 2017 to 2018, global imports of bananas increased
by 2 percent to over 40.3 billion pounds, a record level.
Over a quarter of that went to the U.S.
But if Panama disease takes hold in Latin America, it will decimate the industry.
Cavendish could no longer grow in the quantities
needed to satisfy the world's, and especially the U.S.'s, love of bananas.
It may already be there and we're just not aware of it.
But once it's there, it's kind of a 'horse is out of the barn' type thing.