Episode 10: How the World Ended Up With a Boring Banana
Odd Lots
00:00
The Banana Industry and the Panama Disease
As Panama disease overtook banana crops in the early 1900s, what did fruit companies do other than just find new land and use pesticides? Did they try any other methods to combat the disease? They were warned by their scientists. You've got to diversify. We can't do monoculture. There's so many reasons this is a terrible thing. But it was cheaper and easier. The whole idea of the banana was that it'd be the cheapest fruit in the supermarket. This was their business model. And so in order to keep cost down, they had to do terrible things. It literally take over countries. Literally massacre workers happened over and over again in Latin America.
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Transcript
