Description
Please join us as Douglas Southgate, professor emeritus in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, delivers a presentation on Ecuador's banana business success. Globalized Fruit, Local Entrepreneurs, which Douglas has written with historian Lois Roberts, focuses on growers and exporters from Latin America – especially Ecuador, which has been the world’s leading exporter of bananas since the early 1950s. Multinational corporations headquartered in the United States have been active in the country. However, Ecuador has never been a banana republic in the sense of being dominated economically and politically by one of those corporations. Instead, a competitive market for tropical fruit exists in and around Guayaquil, a port city dedicated to international commerce for centuries. This market has consistently rewarded productive entrepreneurship.
Ecuador is a good setting to examine the contributions that homegrown entrepreneurs have made to agricultural trade and development. Additionally, Globalized Fruit, Local Entrepreneurs clarifies the role that Guayaquil-based merchants – including a few who started out young as impoverished street vendors – played in ending the monopoly that United Fruit (now Chiquita Brands International) had in the banana business through the middle of the twentieth century. Potential threats to the Ecuadorian banana industry posed by plant diseases and the country’s own politicians are also highlighted in the book.
Bio
Douglas Southgate specializes in the study of natural resource issues in Latin America. He has written numerous books, chapters, and journal articles on public policies contributing to tropical deforestation, hydrocarbon development, the economics of watershed management, and related topics. Professor Southgate’s latest book, coauthored by historian Lois Roberts and titled Globalized Fruit, Local Entrepreneurs – How One Banana-Exporting Country Achieved Worldwide Reach, will be published in early 2016 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. A fluent Spanish speaker, he has worked in 15 Latin American, Caribbean, and African nations. Having directed Ohio State’s Latin American Studies Program and served on the Tropical Ecosystems Directorate of the U.S. Man and Biosphere Program, Professor Southgate has been the associate director of the Subsurface Energy Resource Center (SERC) since its creation by the university in September 2011 in response to accelerated oil and gas development in Ohio.
