Worse than Oil? The Geopolitics of the Banana

Mar 13, 2018 | Bhaso Ndzendze
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Attracting encroachments to national sovereignty by rapacious Washington-connected multinational corporations and the meddling attentions of their powerful home country; stunting reform and economic development at every turn; breeding economic dependency; firmly controlled by foreign companies and giving little beneficiation to the country of production; upending and undermining political institutions; and not even sustainable. These are ringing accusations which bring to mind one natural resource –oil. Certainly not the banana. This is somewhat understandable; oil more readily lends itself to the vilification touted in these bleak and cynical claims, and it has been the subject of visible conflict, with allegedly oil-motivated American interludes into Kuwait, Iraq and Libya being all too well known and well televised. Nonetheless, it is one of the blights of modern political economic analysis, including those with a bent for “resource curse” theory, that in their discussion of the interaction of forces that have resulted in the paradoxical plights of some resource-rich countries, they tend to overlook one of the most important culprits, or perhaps better understood as a catalyst in a larger political process; the innocuous banana. And yet, perhaps just as much as oil, this energy source has been the fons et origo of many social, political and economic malaise in many underdeveloped countries who possess them.