GS1 transcripts and glutamine synthetase enzyme activity also increased with increasing NH4 + and NO3 – availability in sorghum roots, suggesting this response may be widespread among plant species. Interestingly, inclusion of soil GWC in multiple linear regression models increased the proportion of GS1 expression variability explained to nearly 30% ; soil water content increases microbial activity as well as the mass flow and diffusion of inorganic N to roots. Further research will undoubtedly show how other factors like crop physiological N demand relative to C fixation and P availability increase the interpretability of N uptake and assimilation gene expression in roots.The N cycling scenarios identified on this set of organic fields corresponded at least in part with landscape clusters based on landscape and soil characteristics . Fields that balanced high yields with low potential for N loss and high internal N cycling capacity were part of PAM cluster 1, which had the highest productive capacity rating . Landscape clusters encompassing more marginal soils included both low-yielding fields exhibiting N deficiency or high-yielding fields that used inputs of highly available N like seabird guano to alleviate N deficiency . But these inputs led to the highest soil NO3 – levels and thus came at the cost of higher potential for N loss. Long-term efforts to increase internal soil N cycling capacity would help alleviate both N deficiency and the need for such large inputs of labile N. Whether farmers are willing to invest in management to increase soil N cycling capacity depends in part on how likely they perceive the benefits to be, especially on marginal soils. The discussions that we had with each farmer in this study indicated genuine interest in adaptive management to further tighten plant-soil N cycling, but this may not always be the case. Indeed,macetas redondas grandes the proportion of management vs. inherent soil characteristics responsible for driving differences in N cycling is challenging to untangle. Farmers may allocate more resources to more productive land and likewise fewer resources to more marginal land, or may selectively transition more marginal land to organic management.

Documenting the multiple services provided by increases in soil quality and facilitating information exchange among organic growers such as through the landscape approach used here may help build momentum for efforts to improve soil quality and plant-soil-microbe N cycling.The health food movement’s latest trend in its ongoing rejection of carbohydrates in favor of fats alarmed cardiologists and public health experts. Studies in the journal of the American Heart Association noted a possible link between coconut oil’s high levels of LDL cholesterol, colloquially known as the “bad cholesterol” which carries a higher risk for coronary disease.In a now infamous 2018 talk at the University of Freiburg, Harvard epidemiologist Karin Michels called coconut oil “pure poison.”Delivered in German, the talk captured headlines in countries that are net importers of coconut products and also commanded the attention of exporting nations and industry trade groups. India’s horticultural minister demanded that Michels retract her statement while the International Coconut Community , a twenty-nation member organization headquartered in Jakarta, issued multiple defenses of coconut oil’s superfood status.Setting aside the merits of competing health claims, the ICC’s response to Michels was a rare albeit brief instance in which the global political economy of coconut oil became visible to North American consumers. The North American demand for coconut products tethers small- and large-scale coconut planters and wage pickers in the South and Southeast to a multitude of producer associations, cooperatives, national governments, and multinational marketing companies who deliver the product to health-conscious consumers. Coconuts—an enduring symbol of tropical ease—are big business. The Philippines, which the Calboms held as evidence of the oil’s benefits, produces an estimated 1.9 million tons of coconut products each year and account for forty-nine percent of the world’s exports. Coconut farms are found in most of the country’s eighty-one provinces, covering 3.3 million hectares or thirty percent of farmlands.

This high output persists despite high poverty rates among coconut farmers, maturing trees with waning production, recurring infestations of coconut scale insects requiring tree felling, and an intensification of destructive typhoons precipitated by the climate crisis.Production depends on forest clearing for new planting, in turn exacerbating the climate crisis behind the industry’s woes. How does a commodity produced by an ailing industry attain and sustain the allure of a natural superfood? Adrienne Bitar’s Diet and the Disease of Civilizationoffers an answer from the perspective of consumption. Coconuts, she writes, play a leading role in a larger North American “food story” in which eating against the grain can recapture “an original, innocent world and mourn the descent of the human race into modern disease.”Diet jeremiads decrying the “fall of man” include the Paleo diet, in which men and women are urged to eat like evolutionary ancestors and the Detox diet, which calls for abstention from refined and processed foods. Coconuts also feature in Pacific Islander efforts to decolonize the everyday dietary. Citing alarmingly high rates of diabetes and obesity, Dr. Terry Shintani’s The HawaiiDiet positions the replacement of fried and refined foods with “foods eaten in Hawai’i before the onset of Western influence” as part of a larger personal, cultural, and ecological healing from the ravages of colonialism.But in making this case, fall of man diets “eternalize a timeless past,” homogenize diversity among Pacific Islanders, and sharpen alleged innate and biological differences between Pacific Islanders. The diets, Bitar writes, exemplify what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia”—a romanticization of that which has been lost to colonial violence in the name of progress of development.This nostalgia for the coconut echoes outside of diet culture as well. Recall, for example, LinManuel Miranda’s invitation to “consider the coconut” as the Motunui villagers of Disney’s Moanapraise the tree, its husk, fibers, water, and meat as “all we need”. Hsu and Vázquez’s “molecular intimacies of empire” can move us toward an account of the coconut’s superfood status that incorporates production. Indeed, the seemingly paradoxical relationship between “superfood” and “ailing agriculture” illuminates the processes by which US empire and capital accumulation extend across geographic space and render biological materials into component parts such as oil and synthetic materials while relegating the risks of those processes to producers and laborers at the supply end of the commodity chain. This essay’s focus is therefore on the American agricultural entrepreneurs, tropical research stations, and penal farms that built a coconut plantation economy in the southern Philippines after 1898.

These Southern Philippine plantations were just one site in what others identify as a transimperial “coconut zone” extending west from the equatorial Pacific Islands to southern India and were also akin to Dole’s pineapple empire in Hawai’i and United Fruit’s banana empire in Central America.Coconuts, pineapples, and bananas constituted an American equatorial fruit empire that fed upon and nurtured discourses of tropicality—the late nineteenth century division of the globe into tropical and temperate worlds. Tropicality held that planning for temperate winters instilled EuroAmericans with traits conducive to industry while the heat and humidity of tropical climes produced a fecund nature and indolent natives who lived off, rather than mastered,maceta 25l the land.The exaggerated fecundity of the tropics was simultaneously a threat to white bodies and a justification for Indigenous dispossession that imagined precontact idylls in which fruits sprang forth from nature rather than human cultivation. The agricultural entrepreneurs of the fruit empire cast coercive labor regimes as necessary improvements on primitive agricultural methods. They neutralized fears of tropical landscapes by stressing their singular ability to “tame” jungles and domesticated foreign foods by emphasizing health. The promotional materials of United Fruit anointed the banana a “superfood” as early as the 1920s.A robust scholarship on tropical commodities has since reconnected the American appetite for bananas and pineapples to colonial plantation.The colonial plantations of the southern Philippines, however, were severed from the this larger history of fruit empires largely because the sites produced copra, the dried kernels from which the oil is expelled, and coconut oil was initially valued for its industrial applications. Coconut plantations preceded the embrace of coconut as a food by decades. The following essay offers an episodic accounting of the American coconut empire in the southern Philippines. It begins with the union of Euro-American industrialization and economic botany and colonial state power in the making of coconut plantations and a Philippine copra export industry in the early twentieth century. Coconut oil oozed unseen into soap, candles, and dynamite before making a more visible debut during the first world war as an ingredient in the butter substitute oleomargarine. Because Euro-American consumers already saw oleomargarine as unnatural, advertisers emphasized coconut oil’s whiteness as a sign of purity, healthfulness, and closeness to nature. But in the interwar period, North American dairy and cottonseed farmers cast Filipinos and their copra as impure in their effort to restrict its import. Their campaign blurred what were already fuzzy boundaries between the natural and the primitive, and between individual bodily risk and risk to the body politic. Yet the nearly four million Filipinos linked to the coconut commodity chain ultimately bore a collective risk that scholars call the “body burdens” of toxic exposure.Imprisoned laborers risked malaria by clearing forests for plantations while planters and pickers later faced exposure to the pesticides and herbicides used to manage the ecological risks of monocropping.

The US racialization of Philippine copra as impure placed what one Philippine official called a “black mark” on the country’s copra in global markets.Independence and the looming loss of US markets in 1946 led Philippine planters to encourage Filipinos to bear the risks of monocropping by eating more of the coconuts they grew and to forge new alliances with other Southeast Asian producers. Such alliances paved the way for the International Coconut Committee. The marketing machinery of the ICC coupled with the interwar association of coconut oil as “unrefined,” and a second world war literature on the coconut as a survival food primed the coconut for its reinvention as a superfood. Far from a traditional food of the tropical Pacific, the coconut’s place in the Philippine economy and dietary is an exemplar of the edible and unequal intimacies of empire.Botanists have long debated the origins and migration of the coconut palm tree across the equatorial Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Because the husks containing the kernel, water, and meat can root after exposure to seawater, nineteenth-century plant geographers speculated that maritime currents, rather than mariners, carried the husks from a singular origin point in either the Americas or East Asia. The thesis, much like tropicality, minimized the human role in plant propagation and has since yielded to a new consensus that allows for a multisited provenance and a guiding human hand.Asian–mainland travellers likely introduced the tree to the Philippine archipelago between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, where it coevolved with the coastal ecology. Coconut palms thrive in sandy soils with circulating ground water. It gives back to the coast by blunting the impact of typhoons and absorbing “wash-over” into its dense root systems.Coconut fronds became shingles that roofed nipa homes; its husked fibers caulked ships; shells and husks could be used as household tools and burnt for fuel. Food vendors sweetened rice cakes with coconut sugar and fermented the tree’s sap into vinegar and tuba, a potent alcohol. Baked in open air under the hot sun, the kernels of the coconut formed copra, from which oil for cooking, washing, lubricating, and medicine was pressed. These myriad uses may have protected small cultivators from debt tenancy as financial capital encouraged the planting of sugar and hemp. The coconut was so ubiquitous that landlords in southeastern Luzon’s hemp exporting Kabikolregion allowed fallen nuts to compost in the soil.This would change within two decades of US rule at which point copra constituted thirty percent of Philippine exports—third behind the far more established trade in sugar and hemp.The rapid rise in copra exports points to the centrality of economic botany and scientific agriculture in making the American colonial state in the Philippines. The US declared war on Spain in 1898, the same year that the United States Department of Agriculture opened an Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction .