Today, the crisis that threatens the world’s largest orange groves of Florida and São Paulo is
greening, a bacterial disease that stunts tree growth and has spread so widely that it threatens the very viability of citrus farming. But this crisis echoes an earlier one: the reappearance in 1984 of citrus canker in Florida’s orange groves after decades of successful containment. Canker, with its characteristic brown lesions, signaled death for growers: death of their trees, of their investments, possibly of their industry. Then, as now, the attempt to understand, contain, and eradicate the disease marshalled the resources of growers’ associations, public universities, state agencies, and the USDA. Then, as now, Florida’s growers turned to the example of São Paulo State, where growers fought their own bitter struggle against canker a decade earlier, and won. But between 1984 and 1996, the attempts to contain Florida’s canker failed, leaving an endemic disease, a disillusioned public, and an uncharacteristic antagonism between growers and the state.
Drawing from trade journals, grower association meeting minutes, international citrus conferences, state and federal government reports, this presentation asks: why did the canker eradication program fail in Florida, when similar programs in São Paulo—which provided the model that was emulated—succeeded? The answer, I argue, can only be found when the political and class relationships that shaped the response to the crisis are examined. In Florida, USDA and state officials attempts to destroy potentially contaminated trees in nurseries and groves were met with delays and lawsuits from growers and their representatives, who wielded serious influence among state lawmakers; while, in São Paulo, growers’ power was dwarfed by the state technocrats and juice processing companies, who refused to risk the health of the whole crop to spare any individual growers’ trees.
