Banana Republic.... Not just a clothing store

When I first started reading my second set of 100 pages in Starved and Stuffed by Raj Patel I was confused because he was talking about Banana Republics, I kept thinking about the clothing store. I wondered if they would still call themselves that if they knew what it could mean to other countries. As Patel points out, bananas were one of the first products to enter into the new food system. Yes the food system and trade treaties that lead to catastrophe for poor farmers.
Something that makes bananas so great is they can survive long shipping periods without going bad, therefore it was the best product to test on. In 1899 the United Fruit Company was founded as the largest banana merchant, but when governments or residents tried to take down the company, it struck them down. One of the biggest incidences with the United Fruit Company is when they accused the Guatemalan President for being a communist because he wanted to buy countries (Click the link and read about the Banana Massacre in Colombia) that went through this same situation with the United Fruit Company, they are not called the victims, they are called "Banana Republics". This term ruins the name of these countries.
their unused (yes, land that was not being used!) and give it to poor farmers and peasants. This caused an outbreak of war! There were over 200,000 lives lost in almost 40 years! All of this because a man wanted to buy unused land to help the people of his country. There are many other
So you haven't heard the name United Fruit Company... did you wonder why? Well it was renamed the popular name that we all know, Chiquita Banana. In the United States we barely acknowledge the horrors that have been caused by the United Fruit Company, the U.S. erased the history that it ever happened. Yet there are so many countries that are struggling to get a reputation back, or recover from the violence that occurred. We all now play the blame the victim game in the United States, I think that the U.S. should be trying to help others too, not just help ourselves.

The United Fruit Co.

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
the Jehovah parcelled out the earth
to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the ’Banana Republics’
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martines flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.

Among the blood-thirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flow as though
on plates into the ships.

Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbours, wrapped
for burials in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of the dead fruit
thrown down on the dump. 

Pablo Neruda