W. A. Bowman was a banana plantation owner and supporter of United Fruit Company in the first decades of the 1900s. Bowman and his contemporaries would have thought of the natural world only in so far as it could benefit them; it was a purely utilitarian relationship. They used the land in order to make a profit and had no concern for the ecological consequences of their actions.
As a banana plantation owner, Bowman would have bought a plot of land in Belize, clear cut and burned the forest there, and planted 170 banana trees per acre. He would have had paid laborers to help him in this task; they would have likely been West Indian creoles, Mayans, “coolies” from the East Indies, or Caribs, a group that resulted from the intermarriages of Africans and Carib Indians. These people would have been paid to clear the land, plant banana trees, and harvest their fruit.
Bowman was a supporter of the United Fruit Company. This multinational corporation’s rather blatant tactics helped it to form a strong monopoly on banana exports in the Caribbean. They owned the boats that carried the bananas to the United States and used price cuts to force all competitors’ from that market. They eventually got into growing bananas themselves, bought huge tracts of land, and forced small farmers out of the business by controlling prices. The company bribed and intimidated government officials to ensure their company interests were not threatened (Moberg, “Crown Colony as Banana Republic”). They had no respect for the land. When Panama disease began to wipe out entire plantations of banana trees and no cure could be found, United Fruit used their considerable means to run from the fungus. They would clear tracts of land, grow bananas there until the Panama fungus arrived (usually within five to ten years), and then move on, destroying whatever infrastructure they had made for their plantations before they left to prevent other farmers from using it (Tropical Determinism).
Bowman himself was forced out of the banana industry by Panama disease and moved on to citrus, ensuring that the land still gave him a profit.
Figure 1: Bananas growing on the Nabitunich campus. These are not the same species of banana that Bowman or the United Fruit Company would have grown. American consumers during the 1920s demanded the exceptionally sweet and slow ripening Gros Michael and therefore the United Fruit Company grew only this type. The monoculture of this particular species was a dangerous endeavor; it turned out to be particularly susceptible to the Panama disease that ravaged banana plantations across the Caribbean. The bananas we typically buy today in the United States are the Cavendish species, which is highly resistant to the fungus that causes Panama disease. (Miller, Tropical Determinism)
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