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Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions in the Costa Rican Banana Industry, 1938–1962

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Steve Marquardt
Steve Marquardt*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

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This article explores one of the earliest large-scale uses of biocidal agro-chemicals in Latin America, the United Fruit Company's hand-spraying of its banana plantations to control sigitoka disease from 1938 to 1962. After discussing the environmental context of sigatoka and the early development and implications of the spray technology, the essay focuses on the thousands of workers who applied the chemicals. Using Costa Rica as a case study, it explores workers' sense of the personal costs of their work as well as their ambiguous relationship to the larger banana workers' union movement. Because of differences in ethnicity, age, and masculine status, pesticide workers were not part of the labor movement's militant core, but their participation in strikes gave unions great power for a time. This power, along with workers' individual job actions, forced fundamental changes in the pesticide program, demonstrating the importance of integrating labor into the study of environmental change in agricultural capitalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , 2002 , pp. 3 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this article was presented to the American Society for Environmental History in Tacoma, Washington, 16–19 March 2000. The author gratefully acknowledges research support from the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for International Education. Special thanks are due to Ana Luisa Cerdas Albertazzi for indispensable guidance in the archives and human lore of the zona bananera.

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