Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism and the Unmaking of Asia's Banana Republic

Existential crises hang over the producers of the world's food. In Bananapocalypse, Alyssa Paredes reveals how many dilemmas facing Big Ag come from self-inflicted wounds. Philippine banana plantations exporting to Japan-a network dubbed "Asia's banana republic"-unleash chemical drift, food waste, polluted effluent, and fungal pathogens into the environment but are then regularly confounded when the by-products they view as external to their operations double back to haunt them. Paredes traces the afterlives of this detritus as the workings of trade, science, and law run up against the imperiled ecologies of the twenty-first century. Wielding a wide analytic lens, Bananapocalypse offers a model that turns the commodity chain inside out, recounting how communities on the plantations' edges turn moments of industrial exhaustion into opportunities for paradigm shifts.