White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

We Ask More of Government, but Say We Want Less

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Ready for a little heresy? Here goes: The government we have is about the right size, or a little small, for what it is asked to do.

I call as my first witness the humble banana. In a few short years the Cavendish banana, the variety which we know and love (about 100 billion are consumed annually worldwide), may fail as a crop throughout the banana-producing regions of the world.

That is because Cavendish bananas, which have no useful seeds and are cultivated from clippings, have been infected with the strain of a fungus that nearly wiped out the world’s former top banana, the Gros Michel, or Big Mike, in the 1960s.

But worry not. Somewhere in the sprawling Department of Agriculture, scientists are working to save the American breakfast fruit, at least I hope so.

I call my second witness: the Burmese Python. This invasive rascal – a constrictor that can crush and swallow an alligator – is perpetrating the animal equivalent of genocide in the Florida Everglades. I hope there is a federal program to contain this constrictor before it overcomes its aversion to cold winters or, as the climate continues to warm, it comes sailing up the Potomac River at 6 miles per hour.

The same hope extends to saving honeybees, without which all plant life (except bananas and other clones) will perish. We also need to save the dwindling bat population, to stop the Asian carp from swimming up the Mississippi River and threatening the Great Lakes. And we need federal sleuths to track down the salmonella infection in eggs and punish the farmers who produced them.

We expect the federal government to be omnipotent and omnipresent. We were shattered to learn, for example, that the Feds had no way of sealing the runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. We also want the government to have limitless compassion for the flood victims in Pakistan and the hurricane survivors in Haiti.

These are just some of the small-scale problems, not the big ones of war and peace, of welfare and Obamacare. But they are among a myriad of things we want done by our government. Now. Fast.

Recently I have become interested in so-called orphan diseases. These are the cripplers and killers that have no powerful lobbies fighting for federal research dollars, and have failed to excite the pharmaceutical industry because there is unlikely to be a cure in a pill. Desperately, those who suffer from these diseases call on the government to do the research and find a cure.

But here is another problem: not enough competition in the government. While the National Institutes of Health is criticized for picking winners and losers for research dollars, it is the only game in town. The solution would be a competing institution.

In the world of energy and nuclear weaponry, there are many competing government laboratories, including the three large federal weapons labs: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore. They compete, they overlap, sometimes they duplicate, but they provide a kind of defense in depth against scientific favoritism.

Pluralism and diversity have a place in government, even if the critics cry “waste.”

Some years ago at an Aspen Institute meeting, the economist Irwin Stelzer, a passionate free-marketer, clashed with James Schlesinger, an economist, historian and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, secretary of defense and secretary of energy. Stelzer’s argument was that the private sector was better and more efficient at research.

Brilliant as Stelzer is (I have known both men for about 40 years), that round went to Schlesinger who listed effortlessly more than a dozen government-funded inventions, from the Internet to the aero-derivative gas turbine. He made the case for government sufficiently well-funded to do the job.

My case is less sophisticated. We keep asking more of government even while we say we want less.

Even the government has not been able to invent a plausible free lunch. So, pay up.

The Back Story of the Breakfast Banana

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To you, the banana may be a fruit that you slice onto your cereal at breakfast. To me it is a slice of history, an examination of a moral dilemma, and an explanation of why the government grows bigger. It is also a tale of mortality because the banana, as we know it, is facing extinction.

Let us begin at the end: The banana that we now enjoy, called the Cavendish, has already been wiped out by Panama disease–a lethal fungus prevalent in Asia and Australia. In the near future, that varietal is expected to be under attack in the large growing areas of the Caribbean and Central America.

The trouble is that the banana cannot fight back: It cannot mutate to meet the new threat in the normal way of plants because the cultivated banana is a clone. Evolution interruptus.

Before the Cavendish was the choice of exporters around the world, there was the Gros Michel banana. But in the 1950s, it fell victim to Panama disease and the Cavendish, in many ways an inferior fruit, had to be substituted.

Bananas, which originated in Asia thousands of years ago, somehow made their way to Africa, and Arab slave traders brought them to the New World. The global banana trade got underway in the 1870s, when entrepreneurs found that they could pick bananas green and they would ripen on their way to market.

American foreign policy in Central America became captive to the banana companies, most famously the United Fruit Company. While the banana trade was a blessing to the campesinos of Central America, it enslaved them to the companies. To support the banana trade the United States invaded, threatened, cajoled and buttressed dictators. The governance of Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama reaped the trade benefits, but paid the price of banana dominance. The banana traders, particularly United Fruit, now known as Chiquita, were vilified in Europe as America’s neocolonial exploiters.

But the truth is more complicated.

In his masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate, wrote poignantly about the Colombian government’s massacre of striking banana workers. But in his memoirs “Living to Tell the Tale,” Marquez also refers to the hope in rural Colombia that United Fruit would return after it had ceased operations in the aftermath of the massacre.

The banana, a nutritious fruit, has often had a bitter harvest. While the United States placed the so-called banana republics of Central America as in its sphere of influence, Europeans, particularly the British, became possessive of banana producers in their Caribbean colonies. As these colonies gained their independence, Europe sought to assist development in the Caribbean by establishing floor prices for bananas. This led to a trade war with the United States, which began in 1993 and ended in 2001.

The banana wars may not be over.

Large fruit exporters, like Dole and Chiquita, with assistance from U.S. laboratories and universities, are seeking to bioengineer the banana to protect it from Panama disease and other lethal attackers that can threaten it at any time. But Europe opposes bioengineered foods and bans their import. Will the Europeans turn their backs on the bioengineered version of a banana that they have known for 140 years? Will they fight U.S. fruit companies that want access to European markets?

The banana, seemingly so benign, illustrates the complexity of foreign relations, the unintended consequences of commodity dependence in poor countries, and why the U.S. government grows like Topsy. Before the banana crisis is resolved, the government will hire more scientists, let more research contracts, and beef up the diplomatic corps with banana trade experts. Banana policy is a slippery business.