Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 1 (2018), p. 163

Ecuador’s banana export industry is the largest in the world, accounting for approximately four million tons of shipments per year. Yet it has received relatively little attention within a large body of scholarship centring on the machinations of United Fruit (UFCO, now known as Chiquita) and other US-based multinationals that are synonymous with the global fruit trade. The main thesis of Globalized fruit, local entrepreneurs is that the prevailing ‘banana republic’ narrative developed elsewhere does not apply to Ecuador, whose industry dates from the mid-1930s, long after the US companies had consolidated control over Central America and the Caribbean. Southgate and Roberts attempt to show how Ecuadorian entrepreneurs from the Guayaquil region, most of them of humble origins, established a banana sector that often out-competed the US-based behemoths, not only in dominating new markets but ultimately in exporting bananas to the US itself.

The authors centre their study on a handful of small-scale capitalists whose business and political acumen allowed them to chart a course independent of UFCO while contending with an often intrusive state, nationalist politicians, and labour movements. The most notable of these investors was Luís Noboa, who rose from penniless street vendor to command a personal fortune of $650 million upon his death, almost all of it derived from banana exports. Their promotion from small-scale traders to powerful agricultural bourgeoisie rested on unique geographic advantages associated with Guayaquil itself, especially the ready availability of easily cleared land, an existing agricultural infrastructure, port and labour force, and, most importantly, immunity from the hurricanes that frequently devastated banana production in the Caribbean basin. Despite these advantages, an export-oriented industry in Ecuador remained impractical until the completion of the Panama Canal and resumption of Caribbean shipping after World War I. By that time, United and Standard Fruit had already perfected a system of vertically integrated production, transportation, ripening and wholesaling of fruit on an industrial scale for the US market.

Analysing the rise of the US companies within the ‘taxonomy of entrepreneurial innovations’ advanced by economist Joseph Schumpeter, the authors suggest that Ecuadorian investors were able to draw upon innovations already developed (at considerable cost) by the US multinationals. When UFCO belatedly entered Ecuador itself as an exporter in the 1930s, local entrepreneurs established strategic alliances with the company to gain access to the organizational and agronomic knowledge (not to mention chemical inputs) required for banana production on a large scale. Much of the Noboa’s success lay in wedding Ecuador’s fledgling banana sector to new markets in the Middle East, Japan, and even Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where he bartered bananas for machinery and raw materials. He thus avoided direct competition with the American firms until he had amassed enough resources and shipping to challenge them in the US market itself, particularly in California and much of the western US.

This is a story well worth telling, as it highlights the role that historical contingency and individual agency play in the creation of global markets, and the capacity of local elites to outmanoeuvre formidable representatives of foreign capital. Southgate and Roberts adopt an unapologetically ‘top-down’ approach throughout, situating the entrepreneurial savvy of home-grown capitalists within an ever-shifting national political context that at one moment encouraged their activities and at others impeded them. Yet their analysis is permeated by a rigid neoliberal bias that blinds them to those who provided the most important ‘factor of production’ for Noboa and his counterparts, that of labour. Ecuadorian farms are known for returning to their workers the lowest share of earnings of any banana industry in the hemisphere (presently about four cents for every dollar of fruit sold in the US). Yet the demands of banana workers and tenant farmers for a greater return to their labour are treated parenthetically, if at all. Land occupations and strikes are simply attributed to the political ambitions of misguided or manipulative politicians and ‘union bosses’ who stand to personally profit from the movements they lead (pp. 119–20). (This criticism is developed in an extended, if not particularly relevant, polemic about the country’s recent nationalist president, Rafael Correa, derided as a ‘troublesome populist’). The authors are openly hostile to the primary existing scholarship on Ecuador’s banana industry, that of anthropologist Steve Striffler, for his putatively ‘anti-corporate cant’ and ‘ideological perspective at least a quarter century past its expiration date’ (p. 36), i.e. the labour theory of value. Striffler’s research on the occupation of UFCO’s Tenguel estate drew upon material from Ecuadorian archives and Chiquita’s own extensive internal memoranda, as well as interviews with dozens of workers and peasants whose families participated in the occupation. Globalized fruit, local entrepreneurs is lightly sourced in comparison, relying on already published material (mostly in English) and interviews exclusively with industry representatives, large growers, and government officials, but almost no archival evidence and evidently no conversations with workers themselves. Ironically, its authors repeatedly draw upon Striffler’s material when it serves to advance their argument, even while otherwise ignoring or belittling the experiences of his primary informants.

Joseph Schumpeter, whose ideas frame much of the thinking in this book, referred to the effects of entrepreneurial innovation and competition as ‘creative destruction’. Some 350,000 Ecuadorians presently work on farms owned by the entrepreneurs that are the protagonists of this work. Much of the latter’s business success stems directly from the fact that their workers are the lowest paid in the Americas, earning around 40 per cent of the average wage of their unionized Central American counterparts. Ecuadorian farms, including those of the Noboa family, have been repeatedly cited by human rights organizations for the widespread employment of child labour in production, where they are regularly exposed to chemical pesticides. Contrary to the claims of this book, the entrepreneurial acumen it celebrates largely rests on such ‘creatively destructive’ arrangements. To understand them, however, readers will have to look elsewhere.