Editing Banana (section)

=== Plantation cultivation ===

{{further|History of modern banana plantations in the Americas}}

[[File:Banana Plantation Panabo City.jpg|thumb|Plantation in the Philippines, 2010]]

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Portuguese colonists started banana plantations in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and western Africa.<ref name="Phora-sotoby.com"/> North Americans began consuming bananas on a small scale at very high prices shortly after the Civil War, though it was only in the 1880s that the food became more widespread.<ref name="Koeppel-2008">{{cite book |first=Dan |last=Koeppel |title=Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World |url=https://archive.org/details/bananafateoffrui00koep |url-access=registration |location=New York |publisher=[[Hudson Street Press]] |date=2008 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/bananafateoffrui00koep/page/51 51–53] |isbn=978-0-452-29008-2}}</ref>  As late as the [[Victorian Era]], bananas were not widely known in Europe, although they were available.<ref name="Phora-sotoby.com">{{cite web |url=http://www.phora-sotoby.com/history.html |title=History of Banana |publisher=Phora-sotoby.com |access-date=April 16, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090416175908/http://www.phora-sotoby.com/history.html |archive-date=April 16, 2009 }}</ref>

The earliest modern plantations originated in Jamaica and the related [[Western Caribbean Zone]], including most of [[Central America]]. Plantation cultivation involved the combination of modern transportation networks of steamships and railroads with the development of refrigeration that allowed more time between harvesting and ripening. North American shippers like [[Lorenzo Dow Baker]] and [[Andrew Preston (businessman)|Andrew Preston]], the founders of the [[Boston Fruit Company]] started this process in the 1870s, with the participation of railroad builders like [[Minor C. Keith]]. Development led to the multi-national giant corporations like [[Chiquita Brands International|Chiquita]] and [[Dole Food Company|Dole]].<ref name="Koeppel-2008"/> These companies were [[monopoly|monopolistic]], [[vertically integrated]] (controlling growing, processing, shipping and marketing) and usually used political manipulation to build [[enclave economy|enclave economies]] (internally self-sufficient, virtually tax exempt, and export-oriented, contributing little to the host economy). Their political maneuvers, which gave rise to the term [[banana republic]] for states such as Honduras and Guatemala, included working with local elites and their rivalries to influence politics or playing the international interests of the United States, especially during the [[Cold War]], to keep the political climate favorable to their interests.<ref name="NZHerald-2008"/>