Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism and the Unmaking of Asia's Banana Republic

Existential crises hang over the producers of the world's food. In Bananapocalypse, Alyssa Paredes reveals how many dilemmas facing Big Ag come from self-inflicted wounds. Philippine banana plantations exporting to Japan—a network dubbed “Asia’s banana republic”—unleash chemical drift, food waste, polluted effluent, and fungal pathogens into the environment but are then regularly confounded when the by-products they view as external to their operations double back to haunt them. Paredes tra...