Business booksUnited Fruit's downfall followed political changes in its production areas, writes Richard Hooper

It is seldom one finishes a book and bemoans the fact that it was not twice or three times as long. However this will be the reaction of many readers to Peter Chapmans's Jungle Capitalists. Even though the work is more tightly focused that its title suggests the reader is left with a desire to know more about the central subject of the book: United Fruit - the company that for 60 years enjoyed the benefit of a monopoly of the US banana market.

The thought of reading a dissertation on the US banana market might provoke a yawn in many a potential reader; however, it should be firmly stifled. This swashbuckling tale relates the happenstance that led to a railway constructor owning large swathes of banana plantations in Costa Rica, with the produce destined for New Orleans; of a careful Bostonian importing bananas from Jamaica into Boston; of the division and control of the US market that they developed; and of the merger of the two operations in 1899.

By that time the Caribbean was surrounded by countries whose economies were dependent or controlled by United Fruit. And the US's foreign policy had started to take a keen interest, particularly in its near neighbours. United Fruit and the ambitions of White House and the State Department intertwined, sometimes adversarially and sometimes to their mutual benefit. The subversion of Central American states was a shared trait. Corruption, fomenting uprisings and armed intervention were their methods. Dictatorial regimes were supported and democratic ones undermined.

In the 1920s both the US government and United Fruit saw the unrest and strikes in the banana plantations as the evidence of communistic influence. Meanwhile its public relations activities, which would be regarded as puerile today, succeeded in keeping its image sparkling among the US populace and made it impossible for the government to bring it to heel through special taxes or anti-trust action.

At the end of 1928, more than 1,000 protesting strikers were killed by machine-gun fire by the Columbian army. The US embassy noted the efficient quelling of the strike stirred up by communist ideas! In the US, the government was compliant, acquiescing in the merger of railway and banana interests and the further merger of banana marketing operations.

While United Fruit traded with Hitler in the pre-war years to the annoyance of Roosevelt, it put its efforts behind the war effort. The banana market had halved during the war and diseases were devastating the crops. The company moved from those affected areas, leaving behind economic ruin, and onto new pastures.

A democratically elected Guatemalan government started to initiate land reform affecting United Fruit. The US, persuaded that this was communistic, ensured that no third party country in the Organisation of American States objected to the proposal to invade Guatemala. So in 1954 regime change was achieved through armed intervention in Nicaragua, supported by CIA planes. This was the highest (or darkest) point of United Fruit's influence.

The economics of the banana industry were changing drastically. Disease and the cost of its prevention, land clearance costs and increasing labour costs led to United Fruit wanting to disengage with production and trying abortively to diversify.

Cuba was about to explode under United Fruit. Much has been written about the Bay of Pigs and the blame and reasons that led to it have been much debated, but what is certain is that United Fruit was up to its oxters in it and provided 28 per cent of the invasion fleet.

United Fruit had lost its touch. Not alone had it participated in an abject military failure, the banana variety that it had relied on for 80 years had finally succumbed to disease. The replacement had been bred not by it but by a smaller rival. The difficulties ran deep. It took two moderately successful radical steps. Firstly it started to sell the plantations to the workers and dug in further down the chain, which it could still control. Secondly it started to brand the bananas as "Chiquita". (This is an initiative that it copied from Fyffes [yes that one!], which it had bought some 50 years previously).

The company sought many suitors but finally succumbed to a corporate raider, Eli Black, who was welcomed by Wall Street in the hope he could re-invigorate the company. While the first few year showed signs of a new spirit, a new disease with no known cure ravaged the plantations, The rival Dole corporation's sales passed out United's, the banana-producing countries formed a selling cartel mimicking Opec and Hurricane Fifi devastated the Honduran plantations. These disasters were compounded with stories circulated that something was amiss with Black's purchase of the shares six years earlier and that he had bribed the Honduran military. Black had an impeccable reputation and could not bear the possible disgrace that was ahead. He became one of Manhattan's jumpers in February 1975.

With that awful end of probably United Fruit's most decent leader, it retreated to a new headquarters at Cincinnati, Ohio, and changed its name to Chiquita. Its influence on US foreign policy had disappeared. The only appearance of United Fruit/Chiquita on the stage since has been as one of the group of producers on whose behalf the US successfully forced the EU to change its banana import regime in the 1990s.

It is a short book of 208 pages, Chapman would have produced a better book if he had stuck only to the material relevant to the United Fruit theme. He brushes over vital periods and actions in the life of United Fruit in a few sentences - the initial merger and the suicide of Black, for instance. One is left with the impression he had never seen the story from inside the United camp and that the research had been based on newspaper reports and previous publications.

Despite these shortcomings, it is an interesting read, full of incident, and well told by Chapman.

Jungle Capitalists. United Fruit and the Invention of Twentieth Century Greed

By Peter Chapman. £10.99 (€16.10) Canongate Books'