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Reconversion. Gone—according to Sam Zemurray—are the reckless, nomadic days of banana planting when United Fruit used to rip out railway tracks from diseased plantations, leaving laborers to shift for themselves in the jungle. Now, rather than let its wartime abacá acreage go back to bush, United Fruit plans to let laborers have the land (which it got for little or nothing) and raise abacá as a peacetime "peasant crop." In 1944 the company opened an agricultural school at El Zamorano, Honduras, to train scientific dirt farmers free of charge.
At Tiquisate, on Guatemala's Pacific coast, United Fruit grows bananas the new way. On what were 25,000 acres of malarial wasteland in 1934, the company has kept 7,000 laborers busy at the sort of work that makes modern banana growing a feat of agricultural engineering. Example: from tall, movable towers giant sprinklers play over 3⅓ acres of banana trees in a swoop, supplying the equivalent of two inches of rainfall a week. A second complicated set of pumps and pipes squirts the bright blue Bordeaux mixture that keeps off the sigatoka disease.
On United's new plantations on the Pacific coast and in the Dominican Republic, homes for workers—complete with kitchen and Stateside toilet—are as big an advance over older hovels as a Park Avenue apartment over a cold-water flat. Minimum wages, though still less than $1 a day, are half again as high as those paid on Guatemalan-owned plantations.
Conversion or Adjustment? Central Americans display a wary reluctance to believe that Saul has become Paul, but such timely changes have won some friends among old critics of United Fruit. In Costa Rica, where United Fruit donated land for labor colonies, Communist-controlled unions named one of the settlements "Colonia Hamer," after the company's Costa Rican manager. Judicious wage increases have also spared United Fruit some labor headaches, but they may not save it from the projected new labor code's provisions for social security, hospitalization at company expense, and overtime pay, which are expected to cost the company a million dollars a year.
Guatemala's Arévalo government also recently introduced a steep profits tax, despite a concession wangled from Ubico forbidding new taxation on United Fruit till 1981. Bargaining is tough. With huge new plantations in the Dominican Republic ready to sprout bananas by 1947, United Fruit can threaten to shut down in Guatemala, as it did in Colombia when disease and the government moved in.
But last week the doughty Guatemalans had come forward with a counter-threat. Under the presidency of Foreign Minister Eugenio Silva Peña, independent planters had discussed a new marketing cooperative to export bananas independently of United Fruit. Once, that would have signaled war without question. Now there would probably be a compromise. Explained Sam Zemurray: "We adjust."