Megan Raby: United Fruit's Experiment Station: Lancetilla as a Laboratory for Corporate Science
From 1926 to 1974 the United Fruit Company operated the Lancetilla Experiment Station near Tela, Honduras. As a laboratory and botanical garden where one of the world’s largest living collections of tropical fruits could be found, it stood in apparent contrast to the vast banana monocultures of the surrounding area. While United Fruit’s infamous plantations depended on the application of pesticides and chemical knowledge to produce a single commodity crop, its Lancetilla Experiment Station pursued a broad research program oriented toward agricultural diversification. Drawing on the writings of United Fruit-sponsored scientists (a surprisingly under-used set of primary sources) this essay examines the history of Lancetilla to explore the shifting relationship between the company’s administration of scientific research and its control of land. Business, labor, cultural, and environmental historians have contributed to an enormous literature on United Fruit, notorious for its influence on Latin American political and economic life during the twentieth century. Historians of science, however, have paid little attention to United Fruit, despite its major sponsorship of scientific research and status as a prototypical transnational corporation. This essay approaches Lancetilla as both a site of agricultural experimentation and as a “laboratory” for corporate science. Its history demonstrates how United Fruit’s (fluctuating) sponsorship of science gave it new means to control and transform the land. At the same time, corporate science was at the center of land disputes and contested visions of economic development in the twentieth century, leaving surprising traces in local landscapes and the face of global agribusiness today.
Megan Raby is a historian of science and environment whose work emphasizes the transnational connections of science in the US and Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) was awarded the 2019 Philip J. Pauly Prize by the History of Science Society. It explores the relationship between the history of field ecology, the expansion of U.S. hegemony in the circum-Caribbean, and the emergence of the modern concept of biodiversity. Megan Raby is also the author of articles appearing in journals including Environmental History and Isis.
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