Name: Why The Banana Business Of Chiquita And Dole Is At Risk
Uploaded: 2021-05-16T16:19:18.000Z
Duration: 22 min 19 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

We eat more of them than any other fruit.

程度の副詞

We even bicker about the proper way to eat them.

Basically, we've gone bananas for bananas.

Specifically, we like this banana: the Cavendish.

There are hundreds of varieties of bananas, but the

Cavendish is the only one widely available in the U.S.

billion dollars worth of the Cavendish, or about 10.5

A deadly fungus that targets the Cavendish is spreading around the world.

The fungus and the disease it causes go by a few

names, most often Tropical Race 4 or TR4 and Panama disease.

But whatever you call it, the result is the same. The

fungus actually infects through the roots, gets into

what's known as the corm, which is the big bulb at the

bottom, and then gets into the vascular tissue.

The first symptom is usually a very characteristic

It hasn't yet arrived in Latin America, the region that supplies the U.S.

But experts agree that it's only a matter of time.

It has spread across oceans, two continents.

And, if you look at them ap, it's coming to Latin America. There's no question about that.

All it takes is one person to transfer this on their

shoes, and then we've got an epidemic and it's going

to sweep through the American production system like fire.

This is troubling news for banana fans and for the

three American companies that dominate global banana

sales. As of each company's most recent public filing,

bananas comprised significant portions of their sales.

We know this because Panama disease has already

destroyed the banana industry once before.

Bananas are, like, the most boring, mundane objects on

This is Dan Koeppel, author of this book about

bananas. Yet behind the banana is this amazing,

It's like science, it's culture, it's it's bloodshed,

it's murder, it's music, it's everything.

U.S. imports the second largest number of bananas,

But banana agriculture barely exists in either place:

a dwindling amount in Hawaii and a moderate amount in the Canary Islands.

To understand bananas improbable domination, we have to go back to the beginning.

Bananas were first cultivated here on this tiny island 3000 years ago.

They migrated with humans across Asia, the Middle

East, and Africa, becoming a staple everywhere they

went. Arabic and European scholars even bickered over

whether the famous fruit that tempted Eve was not an

Bananas arrived in the Americas in 1516, when a

Spanish priest brought them from the Canary Islands to the Dominican Republic.

From there, they spread throughout the rest of the Caribbean.

Bananas are fragile and rot within a week of being picked.

In the early half of the 19th century, the small

amount that managed to make it to the U.S.

But after the Civil War, bananas became a huge craze.

Between 1871 and 1901, the value of the bananas

increased from $250,000  to $6.5 million.

consumption of bananas nearly tripled from 15 million

So many banana ships arrived at these docks on

Manhattan's Lower East Side that they became known as the 'banana docks'.

This shift is thanks to these three entrepreneurs.

By 1899, they had formed a banana importing business called United Fruit Company.

That might not sound familiar, but its modern name

But back then, it was United Fruit and it was huge.

So huge that it gained the nickname 'El Pulpo,' or

'the octopus,' for the stranglehold it developed on

government repeatedly brought antitrust action against

it. So huge that understanding bananas in the first

half of the 20th century means understanding United

United Fruit's business model relied on economies of

I mean the banana really is an impossible export fruit.

I mean, it's fragile, it ripens quickly, it gets

And the way to do it is to make it so cheap that your

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Why The Banana Business Of Chiquita And Dole Is At Risk

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