During the frenzied harvesting, the day started at 3 am and every hour of it was intensely supervised. The region comes alive in the chapter addressing working conditions. It takes as its subject bananas grown on the North Coast of Honduras, which ‘probably shipped more export bananas between 18 than any other place in the world’ (8).

This is an elegant book, well suited for classroom use, that weaves together environmental, labour and consumer histories. Soluri, John (2006) Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX) 337 pp.

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.Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States ‐ by Soluri, John Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United. 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. 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. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. 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.īeginning in the 1870s when bananas first appeared in the U.S. 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.

Soluri banana cultures