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Book discusses
political ecology
of bananas
Lawrence S. Grossman, associate professor of geography at Virginia Tech, has published The Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Farming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean.
Grossman examines banana contract farming in the Windward Islands and its impact on contract-farming enterprises everywhere. He discusses issues such as peasant labor, declining food production, and food-import dependency, as well as the misuse of pesticides. The book encourages readers to reconsider "broader debates concerning the relevance of research on industrial restructuring and globalization for the analysis of agrarian change."
Janet Momsen of the University of California, Davis says the book makes a major contribution. "As a study of the grassroots impact of global trade policies," Momsen said, "it will be valuable to Caribbeanists, anthropologists, economists, and agriculturalists, as well as geographers."
The Political Ecology of Bananas was published in July by The University of North Carolina Press.