The United Fruit Company (UFCo) is notorious for its influence on Latin American political and economic life during the twentieth century. UFCo’s power was rooted in its control and transformation of land. By the 1930s, it controlled more than 3.5 million acres. While converting lowland Caribbean rainforests into banana plantations, the company also remade Central American nations into neocolonial “banana republics.” This checkered history is well known to historians of business, environment, and U.S.-Latin American relations. Historians of science, however, have paid little attention to UFCo, despite its major sponsorship of scientific research and status as a prototypical transnational corporation.
This paper examines the UFCo Research Department as a case of science at the nexus of state and corporate power, focusing particularly on the relationship between the company’s administration of scientific research and its control of land. UFCo engaged in a wide range of research in agriculture, botany, entomology, nutrition, medicine, chemistry, and even archeology. It administered an array of research sites, from the Lancetilla Experiment Station, which explored the possibilities of crop diversification, to laboratories at La Lima, which developed the chemical controls necessary to maintain vast monocultures. UFCo’s ownership of land significantly shaped scientists’ access to tropical environments. At the same time, its (fluctuating) sponsorship of science gave it new means to control and transform Latin American landscapes. Corporate science was at the center of land disputes and contested visions of economic development in the twentieth century, leaving legacies that remain in the landscape today.
