🍌 Bananas, Bloodlines & the Cost of Comfort

Bananas have fascinated me for years.

Not the fruit itself—though they are wonderful—but everything they represent. The systems behind them. The stories. The hidden costs. The bloodlines.

It started when I first went to Guatemala and learned that it was the original banana republic. I remember sitting in a small village, listening to locals speak about the violence they had endured during the period they referred to as La Violencia. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to inflict such suffering on such peaceful and powerless people.

As I looked deeper, I realized that it all traced back to the U.S.-backed coup of 1954. President Jacobo Árbenz had begun a campaign to redistribute unused land from multinational corporations—most notably the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita)—to the rural poor. The company, unwilling to relinquish control, used its influence to convince the CIA to remove Árbenz and install a leader more sympathetic to their interests.

What followed was decades of unrest. A resistance movement formed, led by left-leaning intellectuals and fueled by rural discontent. A brutal 36-year civil war ensued, leaving hundreds of thousands dead—mostly innocent indigenous people accused of sympathizing with the guerillas.

This is not an article on politics. I’ve met people on both sides of the conflict who were deeply hurt. Over time, the war became murky and complex. But the point is this:

At its root, the violence was about land. About control. About bananas.

I was young when I first heard this history, just beginning to understand how poverty, violence, and ecosystem destruction weren’t isolated issues—but interwoven symptoms of a system based on extraction. A system built not just on crops, but on control.

That experience shaped me profoundly. It inspired me to dedicate my life to permaculture—to help smallholder farmers reclaim their land, their dignity, and their autonomy. To offer tools that heal both ecosystems and communities.

Now, nearly 15 years later, I find myself in another banana-growing region—this time in Apartadó, northern Colombia. It’s where my wife is from, and where we’ve returned to visit her family after a summer apart. I took our son with me to Ireland for six weeks, while she came ahead to Colombia. We couldn’t go as a family—we’re still waiting on the paperwork for our adopted Colombian son (her nephew) to be approved. So this year, we split.

In Ireland, I brought my son to our family’s old farmhouse. We looked at black-and-white photos of his great-grandparents—subsistence cattle farmers who also grew their own food in the tough times of 1940s and ’50s Ireland. Back then, growing food wasn’t a lifestyle choice—it was survival. They endured.


Now that same child sits beside me in Apartadó, a hot, humid town surrounded by 30,000 hectares of banana monoculture. His great-grandmother tells me how the land here once pulsed with biodiversity—cooling breezes, birdsong, and the shade of native forest. Now it bakes under the sun, the heat rising alongside the hum of crop-dusting planes spraying chemicals over the same fields every day.

Those fields are worked mostly by Afro-Colombians—the descendants of enslaved Africans brought here to build this industry with their bodies. My wife is descended from them. So is our adopted son. And now, our children—who carry the bloodlines of Irish subsistence farmers and Afro-Colombian plantation workers—inherit this tangled, sacred lineage.

And I feel the weight of that. The beauty. The heartbreak. The responsibility.

🌍 The Real Cost of Cheap Fruit

Back in Ireland, people talk about food inflation like it’s some abstract economic shift—something the government should fix with policy or subsidies. They complain about paying €2.50 for a bunch of bananas that used to cost €1.80 five years ago.

But here’s the truth:

We were never paying the real price to begin with.

We were outsourcing the pain.

We didn’t see the deforestation or the chemical exposure of the workers. We didn’t see the rising temperatures, or the local communities now relying on fans and AC to survive—energy that wouldn’t be needed if the forest canopy still stood. We didn’t pay the cost of biodiversity lost, topsoil destroyed, or small farms swallowed up by monoculture.

And now, thanks to rising energy and labor costs, some of those hidden costs are starting to trickle back to the consumer. The system is straining. Fewer people want to do that work. Why would they? There are other options now—driving Ubers, working construction. So finally, the West is beginning to feel it, just a little.

🍃 Bananas Aren’t the Problem

Don’t get me wrong—bananas are incredible. We grow them on our farm in Guatemala, and they’re part of nearly every tropical design we create. They clean water, regenerate soil, and produce excellent biomass. Because they grow in clumps and die back after fruiting, they’re one of the best plants for building tropical agroforestry systems.

The problem isn’t the plant. The problem is the system.

It’s not just bananas. It’s avocados. Coffee. Sugarcane. Palm oil.

These crops aren’t “bad.” But when grown as commodities, they almost always become part of an extractive machine—one that harms people, land, and culture in the name of cheap exports and quarterly profits. And as long as we rely entirely on those systems, we’re complicit.

 🛠️ There Is Another Way

This isn’t a guilt trip. It’s a call to integrity.

We can grow food differently. In harmony with nature. With community. With dignity. The answer isn’t to cancel bananas—but to rethink the entire supply chain. And for many of us, it means learning to grow some of our own food and supporting regenerative farms and networks that are working toward something better.

Permaculture. Agroecology. Local food sovereignty.

These aren’t fringe movements anymore.

They’re necessary acts of resistance.

Necessary acts of healing.

And beyond the ecological and political, there’s a spiritual thread.

I look at my son—his Irish roots stretching into the hills of Munster, his Afro-Colombian roots tied to the red soil of banana country—and I marvel at the mystery of it all. None of this is coincidence. This is a story of integration. Of pain turned into purpose. Of fractured histories being woven into something new.

This is the work now.

To heal the systems.

To tell the truth.

To participate in the great turning—not out of fear, but out of love.

So next time you eat a banana, ask yourself:

What’s the true cost of comfort?

And how can I be part of the shift?

Neal Hegarty
CreaSol Permaculture