Yale Agrarian Studies Series
Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered.
It is the annual flood pulse—the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain—that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees. In demonstrating these threats to the riverine world, award-winning author James C. Scott examines the life history of a particular river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) of Burma, the heartland and superhighway of Burman culture.
Scott opens our understanding of rivers to encompass their entirety—tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshlands, and the assemblage of life forms dependent on rivers for their existence and well-being. For anyone interested in the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, rivers offer a striking example of the consequences of human intervention in trying to control and domesticate a natural process, the complexity and variability of which we barely understand.
American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or of concrete and steel, which are even worse for the planet. Wood is often the most sustainable material for building, but we need to protect diverse forests as much as we desperately need more houses.
Brian Donahue addresses this modern conundrum by documenting his experiences building a timber frame home from the wood growing on his family farm, practicing “worst first” forestry. Through the stories of the trees he used (sugar maple, black cherry, black birch, and hemlock), and some he didn’t (white pine and red oak), the book also explores the history of Americans’ relationship with their forests.
Donahue provides a new interpretation of the connection between American houses and local woodlands. He delves into how this bond was broken by the rise of a market economy of industrial resource extraction and addresses the challenge of restoring a more enduring relationship. Ultimately, this book provides a blueprint and a stewardship plan for how to live more responsibly with the woods, offering a sustainable approach to both forestry and building centered on tightly connected ecological and social values.
As marine conservation becomes an increasingly urgent issue around the world, there is an equally critical need to understand the ways different conservation interventions attend to or exacerbate social inequality. This book explores the origins of a conservation agenda in Madagascar and the consequences of its neglect of gender.
Drawing on interviews, ecological and social surveys, archival research, and several years of living with fishers in Madagascar, Merrill Baker-Médard examines how access to and control over marine resources are negotiated from fishing villages to the conference rooms of international meetings. Her intersectional approach bridges conservation science, gender studies, and human geography to advance the idea that equity and sustainability are inextricably linked and that practices of reciprocity, accountability, and care are foundational to their achievement.
For millennia, the field of natural history promoted a knowledgeable and unifying view of the world. In contrast, the modern rise of narrow scientific disciplines has promoted a dichotomy between nature and culture on the one hand and between scientific and folk knowledge on the other. Drawing on the fields of anthropology, history, and environmental science, Michael R. Dove argues that the loss of this historic holistic vision of the world is partly to blame for contemporary environmental degradation and science skepticism.
Dove bases this thesis on a study of four pioneering natural historians across four centuries: Georg Eberhard Rumphius (seventeenth century), Carl Linnaeus (eighteenth century), Alfred Russel Wallace (nineteenth century), and Harold C. Conklin (twentieth century). Dove studies their field craft and writing; the political, cultural, and environmental circumstances in which they worked; the sources of their insight; and the implications of their work for modern society. Most of all, the book seeks to discover what enabled those natural historians to straddle boundaries that today seem impassable and to distill that wisdom for a modern world greatly in need of a holistic vision of people and environment.
For two decades, the concept of land sparing, the claim that agricultural intensification can spare land by preventing forest clearing for agricultural expansion, has dominated tropical forest conservation. Land sparing policies transform landscapes and livelihoods with the promise of reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. But that land sparing promise is false.
Based on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, this book traces where and how land sparing becomes policy and charts the social and ecological effects of these political contests. Gregory M. Thaler explains why land sparing appears successful in some places but not in others and reveals that success as an illusion achieved by displacing deforestation to new frontiers. The failure of land sparing exposes a harsh truth behind assurances of green capitalism: capitalist development is ecocide.
Love for the Land explores the power and potential of people-place relationships. Through clear and compelling prose, it elevates the virtues of imagination, affection, and fidelity—concepts promoted by farmer-writer Wendell Berry—and shows how they motivate small- and mid-scale farmers to care for the land, even in the face of adversity. Paying particular attention to farmland loss from suburban sprawl, rampant agricultural consolidation, and, for farmers of color, racial injustice, Brooks Lamb reckons with the harsh realities that these farmers face.
Drawing from in-depth interviews and hands-on experiences in two changing rural communities, he shares stories and sacrifices from dozens of farmers, local leaders, agricultural service providers, and land conservationists. Lamb’s rural roots and farming background enable him to cultivate honest, trusting connections with the farmers he engages, yielding raw and powerful insights. Time and again, compelling evidence reveals that stewardship virtues encourage people to live and act as devoted caretakers.
With a refreshing, accessible, and engaging approach, Lamb argues that these resilient and often overlooked farmers show rural and urban people alike a way forward, one that serves people, places, and the planet. That path is rooted in love for the land.
With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production.
Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity.
By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.
Haiti is widely recognized as the only state born out of a successful slave revolt, but the country’s early history remains scarcely understood. In this deeply researched and original volume, Johnhenry Gonzalez weaves a history of early independent Haiti focused on crop production, land reform, and the unauthorized rural settlements devised by former slaves of the colonial plantation system. Analyzing the country’s turbulent transition from the most profitable and exploitative slave colony of the eighteenth century to a relatively free society of small farmers, Gonzalez narrates the origins of institutions such as informal open-air marketplaces and rural agrarian compounds known as lakou. Drawing on seldom studied primary sources to contribute to a growing body of early Haitian scholarship, he argues that Haiti’s legacy of runaway communities and land conflict was as formative as the Haitian Revolution in developing the country’s characteristic agrarian, mercantile, and religious institutions.
This new work of historical and political geography ventures beyond the conventional framing of the Battle of Ä?iện Biên Phủ, the 1954 conflict that toppled the French empire in Indochina. Tracking a longer period of anticolonial revolution and nation-state formation from 1945 to 1960, Christian Lentz argues that a Vietnamese elite constructed territory as a strategic form of rule. Engaging newly available archival sources, Lentz offers a novel conception of territory as a contingent outcome of spatial contests.
The 1930s witnessed a harrowing social and ecological disaster, defined by the severe nexus of drought, erosion, and economic depression that ravaged the U.S. southern plains. Known as the Dust Bowl, this crisis has become a major referent of the climate change era, and has long served as a warning of the dire consequences of unchecked environmental despoliation.
Through innovative research and a fresh theoretical lens, Hannah Holleman reexamines the global socioecological and economic forces of settler colonialism and imperialism precipitating this disaster, explaining critical antecedents to the acceleration of ecological degradation in our time. Holleman draws lessons from this period that point a way forward for environmental politics as we confront the growing global crises of climate change, freshwater scarcity, extreme energy, and soil degradation.
Why is government distrust rampant, especially in the rural United States? This book offers a simple explanation: corporations and the government together dispossess rural people of their prosperity, and even their property. Based on four years of fieldwork, this eye†‘opening assessment by sociologist Loka Ashwood plays out in a mixed†‘race Georgia community that hosted the first nuclear power reactors sanctioned by the government in three decades. This work serves as an explanatory mirror of prominent trends in current American politics. Churches become havens for redemption, poaching a means of retribution, guns a tool of self†‘defense, and nuclear power a faltering solution to global warming as governance strays from democratic principles. In the absence of hope or trust in rulers, rural racial tensions fester and divide. The book tells of the rebellion that unfolds as the rights of corporations supersede the rights of humans.
In recent years, the popularity of organically grown produce has exploded. In 2014, organic fruits and vegetables accounted for 12% of all produce sales in the United States, with $39 billion in consumer sales reported for 2015. As a federally recognized niche market within the agricultural mainstream, organic farming is increasingly on display in American grocery stores. Yet the organic food most Americans consume today is produced by an industrial food system at odds with the practices and ideals of small-scale farmers. Taking an ethnographic approach, the fieldwork by Connor Fitzmaurice and Brian Gareau at a small New England organic farm sheds light on how farmers navigate the difficult terrain between practices of sustainability and the economic realities of contemporary agriculture. Drawing on extensive research, Fitzmaurice and Gareau examine the historical context, complexities, and viability of nonconventional organic farming practices: practices that seek to balance ecology and community with the business of agriculture.
Engaging new linguistic evidence and reinterpreting published archaeological evidence, this sweeping study explores the place of bushcraft and agriculture in the precolonial history of south central Africa across nearly three millennia. Contrary to popular conceptions that place farming at the heart of political and social change, political innovation in precolonial African farming societies was actually contingent on developments in hunting, fishing, and foraging, as de Luna reveals.
From climate-related risks such as crop failure and famine to longer-term concerns about sustainable urbanization, environmental justice, and biodiversity conservation, African states face a range of environmental issues. As Carl Death demonstrates, the ways in which they are addressing them have important political ramifications, and challenge current understandings of green politics. Death draws on almost a decade of research to reveal how central African environmental politics are to the transformation of African states.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar’s rich biological diversity. Yet the island nation's habitats are still in decline. In this important ethnographic study, Catherine Corson illustrates how the effort to attract high-level political attention to conservation by isolating the environment in national parks and blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers has avoided challenging key drivers of Madagascar's deforestation.
This groundbreaking history explores the many unrecognized, enduring linkages between the state of California and the country of Chile. The book begins in 1786, when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California, and it concludes with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s diplomatic visit to the Golden State in 2008. During the intervening centuries, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically altered California's development. In turn, Californian systems of servitude, exotic species, educational programs, and capitalist development strategies dramatically shaped Chilean history.
Edward Dallam Melillo develops a new set of historical perspectives—tracing eastward-moving trends in U.S. history, uncovering South American influences on North America’s development, and reframing the Western Hemisphere from a Pacific vantage point. His innovative approach yields transnational insights and recovers long-forgotten connections between the peoples and ecosystems of Chile and California.
This groundbreaking book is the first sustained anthropological inquiry into the idea of remote areas. Shafqat Hussain examines the surprisingly diverse ways the people of Hunza, a remote independent state in Pakistan, have been viewed by outsiders over the past century. He also explores the Hunza people’s perceptions of British colonialists, Pakistani state officials, modern-day Westerners, and others, and how the local people used their remote status strategically, ensuring their own interests were served as they engaged with the outside world.
Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.
Swanson, who brings to his narrative the experience of having grown up on a working Virginia tobacco farm, explores how one attempt at agricultural permanence went seriously awry. He weaves together social, agricultural, and cultural history of the Piedmont region and illustrates how ideas about race and landscape management became entangled under slavery and afterward. Challenging long-held perceptions, this innovative study examines not only the material relationships that connected crop, land, and people but also the justifications that encouraged tobacco farming in the region.
The “Hikayat Banjar,” a native court chronicle from Borneo, characterizes the irresistibility of natural resource wealth to outsiders as “the banana tree at the gate.” Michael R. Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo’s native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove’s analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out.
This pathbreaking book analyzes a highly successful participatory development program in Indonesia, exploring its distinctive origins and design principles and its impacts on local conflict dynamics and social institutions.
Historians have long viewed the massive reshaping of the American landscape during the New Deal era as unprecedented. This book uncovers the early twentieth-century history rich with precedents for the New Deal in forest, park, and agricultural policy. Sara M. Gregg explores the redevelopment of the Appalachian Mountains from the 1910s through the 1930s, finding in this region a changing paradigm of land use planning that laid the groundwork for the national New Deal. Through an intensive analysis of federal planning in Virginia and Vermont, Gregg contextualizes the expansion of the federal government through land use planning and highlights the deep intellectual roots of federal conservation policy.
Among the Wola people of Papua New Guinea, our category economy is problematic. Distribution is unnecessary; the producers of everyday needs are the consumers: produce goes largely “from land to mouth” – with no implication that resources are scarce. Yet transactions featuring valuable things -- which are scarce -- are a prominent aspect of life, where sociopolitical exchange figures prominently. The relationship –- or rather the disconnection –- between these two domains is central to understanding the fiercely egalitarian political-economy. In this detailed investigation of a Highland New Guinea agricultural ‘economy’ and acephalous political order—the most thorough inquiry into such a tropical subsistence farming system ever undertaken—esteemed anthropologist Paul Sillitoe interrogates the relevance of key economic ideas in noncapitalist contexts and challenges anthropological shibboleths such as the “gift.” Furthermore, he makes a reactionary-cum-innovative contribution to research methods and analysis, drawing on advances in information technology to manage large data sets.
Over a span of more than three decades, Sillitoe has compiled a huge body of ethnography, gaining unprecedented insights into Highlands’ social, economic, and agricultural arrangements. He uses these here to illuminate economic thought in nonmarket contexts, advancing an integrated set of principles underpinning a stateless-subsistence order comparable to that of economists for the state-market. Sillitoe’s insights have implications for economic development programs in regions where capitalist assumptions have limited relevance, following his advocacy of development interventions more respectful of existing social orders.
Parker Shipton brings a variety of perspectives—cultural, economic, political, and religious-philosophical—and years of field experience to this fascinating study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa. His conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom of the past half century (including perennial World Bank orthodoxy) about the need for credit among African farming people.
This ambitious work is the definitive account of Russia’s land reform initiatives from the late 1980s to today. In Russia, a country controlling more land than any other nation, land ownership is central to structures of power, class division, and agricultural production.
The aim of Russian land reform for the past thirty yearsto undo the collectivization of the Soviet era and encourage public ownershiphas been largely unsuccessful. To understand this failure, Stephen Wegren examines contemporary land reform policies in terms of legislation, institutional structure, and human behavior. Using extensive survey data, he analyzes household behaviors in regard to land ownership and usage based on socioeconomic status, family size, demographic distribution, and regional differences. Wegren’s study is important and timely, as Russian land reform will have a profound effect on Russia’s ability to compete in an era of globalization.
Notes from the Ground examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in nineteenth-century America. Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, the book shows how and why agrarian Americans—yeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alike—accepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land. By detailing the changing perceptions of soil treatment, Benjamin Cohen shows that the credibility of new soil practices grew not from the arrival of professional chemists, but out of an existing ideology of work, knowledge, and citizenship.
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.
In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
Close to three quarters of U.S. households buy orange juice. Its popularity crosses class, cultural, racial, and regional divides. Why do so many of us drink orange juice? How did it turn from a luxury into a staple in just a few years? More important, how is it that we don’t know the real reasons behind OJ’s popularity or understand the processes by which the juice is produced?
In this enlightening book, Alissa Hamilton explores the hidden history of orange juice. She looks at the early forces that propelled orange juice to prominence, including a surplus of oranges that plagued Florida during most of the twentieth century and the army’s need to provide vitamin C to troops overseas during World War II. She tells the stories of the FDA’s decision in the early 1960s to standardize orange juice, and the juice equivalent of the cola wars that followed between Coca-Cola (which owns Minute Maid) and Pepsi (which owns Tropicana). Of particular interest to OJ drinkers will be the revelation that most orange juice comes from Brazil, not Florida, and that even “not from concentrate” orange juice is heated, stripped of flavor, stored for up to a year, and then reflavored before it is packaged and sold. The book concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of why consumers have the right to know how their food is produced.
This book deals with an important and timely issue: the political and economic forces that have shaped agricultural policies in the United States during the past eighty years. It explores the complex interactions of class, market, and state as they have affected the formulation and application of agricultural policy decisions since the New Deal, showing how divisions and coalitions within Southern, Corn Belt, and Wheat Belt agriculture were central to the ebb and flow of price supports and production controls. In addition, the book highlights the roles played by the world economy, the civil rights movement, and existing national policy to provide an invaluable analysis of past and recent trends in supply management policy.
This fascinating interdisciplinary book is about land, belonging, and the mortgageand how people of different cultural backgrounds understand them in Africa. Drawing on years of ethnographic observation, Parker Shipton discusses how people in Africa’s interior feel about their attachment to family, to clan land, and to ancestral graves on the land. He goes on to explain why systems of property, finance, and mortgaging imposed by outsiders threaten Africa’s rural people.
The book looks briefly at European and North American theories on private property and the mortgage, then shows how these theories have played out as attempted economic reforms in Africa. They affect not just personal ownership and possession, he suggests, but also the complex relationships that add up to civil order and episodic disorder over a longer history. Focusing particular attention on the Luo people of Kenya, Shipton challenges assumptions about rural economic development and calls for a broader understanding of local realities in Africa and beyond.
Why is the World Bank so successful? How has it gained power even at moments in history when it seemed likely to fall? This pathbreaking book is the first close examination of the inner workings of the Bank, the foundations of its achievements, its propensity for intensifying the problems it intends to cure, and its remarkable ability to tame criticism and extend its own reach.
Michael Goldman takes us inside World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., and then to Bank project sites around the globe. He explains how projects funded by the Bank really work and why community activists struggle against the World Bank and its brand of development. Goldman looks at recent ventures in areas such as the environment, human rights, and good governance and reveals howdespite its poor track recordthe World Bank has acquired greater authority and global power than ever before.
The book sheds new light on the World Bank’s role in increasing global inequalities and considers why it has become the central target for anti-globalization movements worldwide. For anyone concerned about globalization and social justice, Imperial Nature is essential reading.
The ten studies recast and expand what is known about rural society and agrarian issues, examining such topics as poverty, subsistence, cultivation, ecology, justice, art, custom, law, ritual life, cooperation, and state action. Each contribution provides a point of departure for new study, encouraging deeper thinking across disciplinary boundaries and frontiers.
The need to preserve farm animal diversity is increasingly urgent, says the author of this definitive book on endangered breeds of livestock and poultry. Farmyard animals may hold critical keys for our survival, Jan Dohner warns, and with each extinction, genetic traits of potentially vital importance to our agricultural future or to medical progress are forever lost.
This comprehensive book features:
complete information on the history, characteristics, qualities, and traits of 138 endangered livestock breeds (goats, sheep, swine, cattle, horses, other equines) and 53 poultry breeds (chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese)
where these breeds may be seen today
the degree of rarity of each breed in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada
information on feral livestock populations
160 color photographs and over 80 black and white photos and historical illustrations
Biological diversity is as crucial in agriculture as it is in nature, and it is equally important to the economic health of both industrial and nonindustrial societies. This book offers a sweeping assessment of crop diversity and the potential for its preservation. Stephen B. Brush develops a framework for investigating biological diversity in agriculture that focuses on the knowledge and practice of farmers, and he shows how this human ecology perspective can be applied to three global issues that affect crop resources.
Brush defines the dimensions of crop diversity and outlines the essential questions surrounding it. He describes the techniques used to maintain diversity in major crops of three cradles of agriculture in which he has worked: potatoes in the Peruvian Andes, maize in Mexico, and wheat in Turkey. Finally, he explores the policy issues surrounding genetic erosion of crop varieties, conservation of crop diversity, and ownership of genetic resources.
Why are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) so successful in today’s world? How do they empower themselves? This insightful book provides important new perspectives on the strategic thinking of NGOs, the way they identify themselves, and how they behave. Raymond L. Bryant develops a novel theoretical perspective around the concept of moral capital and assesses that concept through in-depth case studies of NGOs in the Philippines.
The book’s focus is on perceptions of NGOs as moral and altruistic and how such perceptions can translate into social power. Bryant examines the ambiguous qualities of NGO strategizing, the ways in which the quest for moral capital is bedeviled by the need to compromise with political and economic elites, and the possibilities for NGOs to achieve political goals as moral leaders.
This book continues the dramatic story in the authors’ prizewinning Chinese Village, Socialist State. Plumbing previously untapped sources, including interviews, archival materials, village records and unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters, the authors capture the struggles, pains and achievements of villagers across three generations of social upheaval.
Peter Boomgaard shows how people and tigers adapted to each other’s behavior, each transmitting this learning from one generation to the next. He discusses the origins of stories and rituals about tigers and explains how cultural biases of Europeans and class differences among indigenous populations affected attitudes toward the tigers. He provides figures on their populations in different eras and analyzes the factors contributing to their present status as an endangered species. Interweaving stories about Malay kings, colonial rulers, tiger charmers, and bounty hunters with facts about tigers and their way of life, the book is an engrossing combination of environmental and micro history.
Cold War Ecology records how East German leaders’ indifference to human rights and their disregard for the landscape affected the rural economy, forests, and population. This lesson from history suggests new ways of thinking about the health of ecosystems and landscapes, Nelson shows, and he proposes assessing the stability of modern political systems based on the environment’s system qualities rather than on political leaders’ goals and beliefs.
Large and wealthy global companies too often fail to acknowledge environmental responsibility or workers’ rights. This book tells the dramatic story of one companyChiquita Brands Internationalthat decided to change the negative paradigm. Formerly the notorious United Fruit Company, a paternalistic organization that gave the name Banana Republic” to tropical countries in Central America, Chiquita defied all expectations in the mid-1990s by forming an innovative pact with the Rainforest Alliance that transformed not only the corporation itself but also an important segment of the banana industry.
Gary Taylor and Patricia Scharlin reveal the inside story of how corporate executives, banana workers, local leaders, and conservation advocates learned to work together and trust one another. Over the objections of skeptical critics, Chiquita and the Rainforest Alliance established a Better Banana seal of approval” to certify genuine efforts to improve soil and water quality, ensure rainforest conservation, and enhance worker health and safety. This chronicle of their collaboration, told objectively and with extensive documentation, presents a promising new model of cooperative behavior--a model that shows how multinational companies can become motivated to solve critical global problems.
