Banana plants, like most crop plants, are at once biological organisms and cultural artifacts – products of both evolutionary contingencies and human agency.
Early cultivators in Southeast Asia first domesticated bananas several thousand years ago. Dozens of varieties subsequently diffused throughout South Asia, the Pacific and Africa.
How and when banana cultivars reached the America is subject to debate. Between 1500 and 1850, their consumption was largely confined to the tropics; in the sugarcane-growing regions of Brazil and the Caribbean, slaves routinely grew bananas and plantains on provision grounds.
The self propagating, high yielding herbaceous plants were well suited to meet the needs of slaves because they required little labor to cultivate and transform into food. In addition, the fast growing, tall and leafy plants provided shade for ground crops.
The dynamics of the post-emancipation period in the Caribbean helped to set the stage for export bananas growing in the region. In the struggle to find dignified livelihoods, the descendents of slaves would be among the first to sell bananas to itinerant North America schooner captains in the mid-nineteenth century.
The export banana trade formed around a single variety: Gros Michel. The variety apparently did not reach the Americas until the early nineteenth century. In 1837, Jean Pouyat, a coffee planter in Jamaica, introduced a Gros Michel rhizome that he had acquired in Martinique.
The variety soon flourished in Jamaica and later spread throughout Central America. Although this “creation story” may be apocryphal, it suggests that the variety’s genetic base was exceedingly narrow, a condition that would shape export in crucial ways.
As both small – and large scale Gros Michel monocultures replaced lowland forests and wetlands, a qualitatively different agroecosystem took form that “invited the development of disease epidemics by providing high densities of genetically uniform hosts”.
In addition, the railroads and shipping lines that linked production zones facilitated the movement of pathogens across localities and regions.
Banana to America
