Banana (17 page)

Then, still clutching his briefcase, the man who controlled the world's largest banana empire jumped.

“Mr. Black,” the
Times
report continued, “in a blue suit, hurtled down to the northbound Park Avenue ramp, falling on the roadway before horrified motorists.”

While Black's body lay in the street, the papers from his briefcase began to blow across the intersection. Neither among them, nor in his office above, was any suicide note.

Eli Black's funeral was attended by over five hundred people; the president of Yeshiva University gave the eulogy. The U.S. senator from Connecticut attended. The overriding emotion was not just sadness: The mourners were bewildered. Yes, things had been bad. But the sunglass division sale, announced the day following Black's death, would have evened the company's balance sheet. Surely, as a successful businessman, Black knew that his situation would eventually turn around. Even the rabbi officiating at the ceremony—he'd flown all the way from Jerusalem to honor Black—closed his remarks with an unanswered question: “How many persons,” he asked, “pushed Eli to a desperate option—how many contributed to his untimely tragedy—and who called on Eli to choose the wrong door?”

The mystery lasted ten weeks.

The police quickly ruled Black's death a suicide. The only investigation remaining to be made was by the Securities and Exchange Commission, a routine inquiry always performed after such events. Black was working hard to squeeze every dollar out of United Brands. What he'd done was absolutely consistent with the company's history—in fact, it seemed comparatively minor—but it was absolutely contradictory to Black's values: In order to reduce the company's tax liabilities in Honduras, Black had personally authorized a $1.25 million bribe to Oswaldo López Arellano. The bribe had the intended effect—the tax on bananas was reduced to a quarter per box. But it must have had a huge effect on Black. News of the bribe would have been humiliating; it would certainly have led to his resignation—and possibly prosecution.

The answer to Eli Black's suicide may lie in the friction between two poles: the checkered history of United Fruit, which Black had vowed to atone for, and the ethos most important in Black's life—not business, but faith, as exemplified by the Torah, the holiest Hebrew text, and one that Black, as a rabbi and scholar, had studied his entire life.

The passage that likely tore Black apart is found in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy, one of the Bible's opening chapters, imported directly from the earlier Jewish text. The words, spoken by Moses, come from God himself, brought to the wandering Israelites from Mount Sinai. This is the same part of the Bible that contains the Ten Commandments and God's promise to reserve Israel as the Jewish homeland. The pronouncements of Moses also contain the mitzvah, Hebrew for “commands,” strict rules for living a moral and just life. To pay secret tribute for special favor is considered a dual sin: “Bribery,” says chapter 16, verse 19, “blinds the eyes of the wise, and perverts the words of the just.”

The SEC investigation ultimately found that Black had surreptitiously funneled money to Honduran officials. For this, a penalty of $14,000 was imposed.

S
INCE
1958 Phil Rowe had slowly, painstakingly been concocting better bananas. In a series of photos—Rowe took snapshots of his progeny, and often displayed them with full parental pride—we see one breed improving year by year. A wild bunch photographed in 1959 has just a few bananas on it, stubby and inedible. By 1969 the fruit, cooking bananas in this case, is robust, with a full-sized, appealing bunch made up of over a hundred individual fingers. The bunches depicted are 2,000 iterations from their original ancestor. By 1979, about 3,500 steps from the start, the bunches are even larger and have yielded several distinct varieties. But despite these successes, the 1970s were a time of decline for banana breeders. Eli Black's cost-cutting measures eliminated much of the funding for the La Lima laboratories. Company managers had concluded there was little need for a better commercial banana after all: Panama disease appeared to be gone, and Sigatoka was controllable with chemicals (which consumers were unaware of and unaffected by, since the fruit, protected by thick skin, carries only trace amounts of residue, and what little remains washes off in processing).

Rowe turned his work toward plantains. But United Brands needed the starchy green bananas far less than it did sweet yellow ones. Every banana dollar the company earned came from the Cavendish. Even when Rowe did concentrate on developing a dessert-type fruit, results were relatively poor since such a fruit needed a wider variety of qualities to be considered acceptable. There was another issue: During that era, the ability of U.S. breeders to patent plants was limited and poorly enforced. Exclusivity was restricted to just seventeen years, and in practice the rules—even if infringement could be detected, which was often an impossible task—didn't necessarily apply internationally. (Today, because much breeding is done on a molecular level by biotechnology countries, the rules on plant patenting have become even more confused; efforts to “correct” the situation have generally not succeeded in making sure that the interests of people who grow food for subsistence are preserved along with the corporate right to market exclusively developed products.) Why would Chiquita develop a better banana, wrote former company researcher Ivan Buddenhagen, who was working with Rowe at the time, “when any new cultivar would be stolen and used by others? Why subsidize anyone else?”

Rowe continued his work. But increasingly, he seemed to be falling behind. New breeders, mostly funded by European institutions and philanthropic organizations, began to spring up in Africa. These pursuits were aimed at subsistence-level bananas, and though they didn't generally move beyond the theoretical stage until the 1990s, according to Buddenhagen they did tally one major success: In 1981 Brazilian researchers developed a fusarium-and-Sigatoka-resistant hybrid. The fruit is considered a sweet, or dessert, banana and is widely grown there, but is not seen as a good candidate for Cavendish replacement. Brazilians prefer bananas that most consumers of yellow bananas would consider odd-tasting: They're just a tad sweet, with a consistency and taste closer to an apple or unripe pear. Not great for cereal. But no Brazil-like progress was being made in Honduras. “The key banana research center and only viable breeding program,” Buddenhagen says, “was dying.”

Chiquita was simply too distracted, Buddenhagen adds, with “anti-trust, new Latin exporting groups, tariffs, overproduction, hurricanes, buy-outs, and take-overs.” In 1983 Chiquita stopped research altogether. It didn't close the facility—instead it left a skeleton staff (Rowe and few others) to find another way. The answer was FHIA. The new program, funded by international institutions, would take over the old United Fruit labs. Rowe and his colleagues would now begin to do what the rest of the world's banana scientists were doing: focusing on the bananas people survived on.

At the start, FHIA was handicapped by its reputation. Most of the world that knew bananas couldn't disassociate it from Chiquita. “Too much negative stigma,” Buddenhagen says. Instead, as FHIA scraped by, global banana breeding finally began to take off, with work advancing on nearly every continent. Moreover, though much of the traditional breeding clearly followed in Rowe's footsteps, new ideas about manipulating bananas at the basic DNA level were beginning to take hold. Conventional breeding had seen too many results that were considered, at best, half successes.

To outsiders, it seemed that Phil Rowe had become irrelevant.

Then came Goldfinger.

IT TOOK A QUARTER CENTURY
for Phil Rowe to come up with his dream banana. During that time, Honduras had had nine presidents; Guatemala, ten. The company he began with had changed its name, lost money, lost its leadership position in the market, and lost Eli Black. Black Sigatoka had begun to decimate plantations across the region and had spread to Africa and Asia. The La Lima research facility was abandoned and reborn as FHIA. Through all those years, just twenty banana varieties out of the twenty thousand tested by the facility showed any of the desired traits. But even those bananas weren't fully realized. They had some of what they needed, but not all.

Then came the fruit good enough to be designated FHIA-01. Because of its rich color and stubby profile, Rowe nicknamed it Goldfinger.

I TASTED A GOLDFINGER
as I walked through FHIA's experimental plantation with Juan Fernando Aguilar. “Try this one,” he said, pulling an almost rotund fruit from a towering plant.

The banana is a cross between the applelike Brazilian Prata and a rare Asian variety collected by United Fruit's explorers in the 1960s.

For months I'd been learning what the world's dream banana needs and repeating it like a mantra, because it is the single most important element of finding a way out of the Cavendish crisis: controllable ripening, tough skin, good taste, high yields, resistance to disease, sturdy trees. I'd also come to believe that such a banana could never truly exist.

I was about to be proved wrong.

Phil Rowe's masterpiece does things no other banana can: It
never
turns brown. The fruit remains firm and solid for far longer than the Cavendish does. It is a dual-purpose banana: It can be cooked like a plantain when green or eaten like a Cavendish or Gros Michel once it brightens. Goldfinger bunches are full and even oversized—more robust than the Cavendish, even approaching Gros Michel. The leaves that protect Goldfinger are green and thick.

I stood under the shade of those leaves in the experimental banana farm Rowe founded. For several rows around me, they were the only available respite from the sun. There were other plants as close as three or four feet, but their leaves were rotted and crumbling. They were infected with Black Sigatoka. Goldfinger is virtually immune.

Aguilar told me that the soil has also been infected with Panama disease. Goldfinger resists that malady as well.

There's even more good news about Rowe's creation. Goldfinger can be grown across a wider spectrum of terrain and weather conditions than the Cavendish, making it—in sufficient volume—cheaper to produce. Because it resists so many pests, it can be grown organically on land that has already been cleared. Other organic bananas need to be grown on relatively freshly cleared land and at higher altitudes, where diseases spread more slowly. There just isn't enough terrain like that to make naturally grown Cavendish an answer to the Panama disease resurgence, even if the environmental costs of clearing forest for plantations could somehow be mitigated.

But, even as Aguilar tells me about Goldfinger's very real virtues, he and I both know that there is one attribute that can't be described in words or pointed out on the vine.

How does Goldfinger taste?

Aguilar pulls one down—a thick, bright yellow fruit—and hands it to me.

It peels easily enough, and I'm impressed that the skin is thick: I know enough to recognize a strong banana when I see one.

I bite into it.

This is what's good about Goldfinger. And it is the same thing that isn't good about Goldfinger. I like this banana. I like it a lot.

But it doesn't taste, or feel, like a Cavendish. The flesh is heavier, less creamy. It is tart, with a taste at least as sharp as a Brazilian Prata. You can occasionally find a Goldfinger in a specialty market. Some refer to the fruit as an “apple banana.” The more proper term, when experts characterize the fruit's taste, is an “acid banana.”

The question is simple: If it doesn't taste like the Cavendish, does that mean it also doesn't taste like a banana? “What happens when Cavendish goes against an acid banana,” says Aguilar, “is that people pick Cavendish.”

SO DO THE BIG BANANA COMPANIES
,
who also know the complications that would arise if Goldfinger, which requires different shipping, storage, and ripening techniques, were mixed in with Cavendish.

Could Goldfinger replace the more common fruit if the Cavendish were to disappear, if buyers and growers had no choice? It is impossible to say, but it is certain that making the changeover would be a gamble. Rowe's greatest banana tastes so different from what we're now accustomed to that the transition could be much more jarring to the consumer than the Gros Michel changeover.

It's difficult, Aguilar told me, to see Goldfinger as the grail banana.

Could it provide the genetic material for that banana, though? Could Goldfinger, through more breeding, more experimentation, be turned into something better, something more acceptable?

Phil Rowe believed it could. The breeder, wrote Franklin Rosales, a close colleague and codeveloper of many FHIA varieties, “tried in all possible arenas to convince people that ‘traditional breeding' was the best alternative for the banana and plantain industry.” Rowe was an enigmatic genius; he was an accomplished scientist; he was also an evangelical Christian. His understanding of how important bananas were made him a beloved character in impoverished Honduras. On many mornings, a half dozen or more locals would queue up at the La Lima research station. Rowe would give them fruit, or jobs, and sometimes even pay for their schooling. It was as if he was trying, all on his own, to right the wrongs of United Fruit—both social and biological. It would be hard to say whether or not Rowe succeeded. His banana varieties are now growing across the world and have been productive as subsistence bananas, which have far fewer requirements for success than their commercial counterparts. There are now over twenty fruits with the FHIA designation.

FHIA director Adolfo Martinez grimaced when I asked him for Rowe's contact information. The pioneering banana researcher, he told me, passed away in 2001. He was sixty-two years old. His dream of a perfect banana had gone unfulfilled. One of his colleagues told me that Rowe was reserved and revealed little of his own deepest thoughts, other than to express unbridled optimism, so it is hard to say how much of a toll this took on him or whether he felt that the mission he'd set for himself was too large, too frustrating, too impossible. Rowe's biggest influence was in Cuba—a country so poor that it couldn't afford to spray existing crops against Black Sigatoka, forcing it to convert, wholesale, to a FHIA variety that resisted the disease.

“We will always remember him with admiration, love, and respect,” wrote Cuban banana researcher Jose Manuel Alvarez. “All of those feelings will be materialized in the farms around the island where today the fruits of his work are flowering.”

Cuba proved that a human-modified banana could be grown successfully. But it was a small victory when viewed against the backdrop of decades of frustrating results.

On Sunday, March 25, 2001, near the La Lima research facility, Phil Rowe committed suicide. His body was found hanging from a tree, surrounded by the banana plants at FHIA's Guarama Uno plantation. A note he left to his wife and two children said, “Please forgive me.”

Rowe's impact wasn't just on banana science—he'd also, in a way, helped rehabilitate the reputation of the United States in Honduras. It wasn't possible for Rowe to erase nearly a hundred years of history, but he accomplished as much as any one person could: “We have lost the best American who ever came to Honduras,” wrote Billy Peña, a columnist for the
Tiempo
newspaper.

It is impossible to know why Rowe took his own life. What is certain is that his death cost the world of traditional banana husbandry the most important and experienced mind it had. And if breeding a Cavendish replacement with Rowe alive was difficult, his departure set back the effort even further.