Events News
Financial Times journalist Peter Chapman lectures at the Moore School
The company that marketed bananas as the first
commercialized fast food set the stage for the power and influence of today's multinational
corporations, British journalist and author
Peter Chapman told some 250 students, faculty, and community members April 7
during a lecture and dialogue at the Moore School of Business.
Chapman's new book, Bananas!: How the United Fruit Company Changed the World, was published in January. The publisher, Canongate U.S., describes the book as telling how "one company wreaked havoc in the 'banana republics' of Central America, and how terrifyingly similar the age of United Fruit is to our age of rapid globalization."
The "heavy-handed" United Fruit Company, Chapman said, was founded in 1899 by American businessmen fleeing from the anti-trust laws being enacted at the time by the U.S. government. The company, he said, played a role in numerous coups, invasions, and wars in Central America – some with the help of America’s Central Intelligence Agency. United Fruit also pioneered some of the business world’s earliest marketing strategies ("Chiquita Banana"), along with public relations strategies still in use. And today’s familiar term “corporate social responsibility” was coined in the 1970s by the then-CEO of United Fruit, Chapman said.
The banana as we know it today is dying, Chapman said, because of a genetic defect making it impossible to fight off pests. The likely result is that fruit companies will have to "diversify" the types of bananas grown and sold. This will make bananas more expensive, perhaps relegating them again to the luxury fruit they once were, before United Fruit came into being.
Chapman writes for the Financial Times and was a correspondent for The Guardian, Latin American Letters, and the BBC in Central America and Mexico.
His visit to the Moore School was cosponsored by the University of South Carolina’s Latin American Studies Program, the Department of History’s Warwick University Exchange Program, the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies, and the Richard L. Walker Institute of International and Area Studies.
Jan Collins
April 2008