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Banana plantation at Quiriguá

Any visit to Quirigua is not complete unless you visit the Del Monte banana packing plant right next door. Del Monte's Plant #22 is a fascinating visit into early 1900's automation. What looks to be a highly automated operation really only has four areas that are machine driven. The rest of the operation runs manually, but the combination is designed to maximize productivity of the people.

As you drive past the banana fields you begin to glimpse some of the system of monorails used to carry the banana stalks from the field to the packing plant. Workers cut a banana stalk from the tree and hang it on one of the monorail's hooks. Thus, each stalk goes from tree to train and never touches the ground to insure bruise free bananas. The monorail tracks are light and can be moved to the area where the bananas are being picked each day.

Small engines, with an engineer aboard, pull trains of banana stalks from the fields into the stripping shed. In the shed, the train is broken down to the individual stalks and is rolled, still hanging from overhead tracks, to the cutters. Cutters strip away the protective plastic bags (placed over the bunches in the field to protect them from larger insects a and the inevitable dust) and cut the bunches off the individual stalks. Workers load the stripped stalks into small trucks to be used for mulch.

The bunches go into a washing vat to disinfect them and to allow a long line of sorters to trim and reject those with blemished or flawed skins. Most bunches are 6 to 12 bananas and of uniform size and complexion. An elevated conveyor belt carries the rejected bunches to large trucks for eventual shipment to local markets, El Salvador and Mexico.

The "perfect" bunches float down one of four long pools of water treated to retard ripening. Pool #4 contains extra chemicals for those bananas destined for Europe. A worker weighs a collection of bunches, enough to fill the box arriving on an overhead conveyor, places them inside the pre-installed protective plastic bag and sticks on the familiar company labels.

Those full boxes travel on roller tracks into the waiting box cars of the narrow gauge railroad that will take the bananas to the port town of Santo Tomás on the Caribbean. There they are loaded into containers on a banana boat and are shipped around the world.

Banana plants.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, Portuguese colonists started banana plantations in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and western Africa. North Americans began consuming bananas on a small scale at very high prices shortly after the Civil War, though it was only in the 1880s that the food became more widespread.


Plantation cultivation.
The earliest modern plantations originated in Jamaica and the related Western Caribbean Zone, including most of Central America. It involved the combination of modern transportation networks of steamships and railroads with the development of refrigeration that allowed more time between harvesting and ripening.

  • North American shippers like Lorenzo Dow Baker and Andrew Preston, the founders of the Boston Fruit Company started this process in the 1870s, but railroad builders like Minor C. Keith also participated, eventually culminating in the multi-national giant corporations like today's Chiquita Brands International and Dole.
  • These companies were monopolistic, vertically integrated (meaning they controlled growing, processing, shipping and marketing) and usually used political manipulation to build enclave economies (economies that were internally self-sufficient, virtually tax exempt, and export-oriented that contribute very little to the host economy). Their political maneuvers, which gave rise to the term banana republic for states such as Honduras and Guatemala, included working with local elites and their rivalries to influence politics or playing the international interests of the United States, especially during the Cold War, to keep the political climate favorable to their interests.

Transport.
Bananas must be transported over long distances from the tropics to world markets.[88] To obtain maximum shelf life, harvest comes before the fruit is mature.

  • The fruit requires careful handling, rapid transport to ports, cooling, and refrigerated shipping. The goal is to prevent the bananas from producing their natural ripening agent, ethylene. This technology allows storage and transport for 3–4 weeks at 13 °C (55 °F).
  • On arrival, bananas are held at about 17 °C (63 °F) and treated with a low concentration of ethylene. After a few days, the fruit begins to ripen and is distributed for final sale. Ripe bananas can be held for a few days at home.
  • If bananas are too green, they can be put in a brown paper bag with an apple or tomato overnight to speed up the ripening process.

See also

Source

Location

Location: 7WCV+WCH, Los Amates, Guatemala