Consider the Coconut: Scientific Agriculture and the Racialization of Risk in the American Colonial Philippines

This article invokes the “molecular intimacies of empire” to illuminate links between superfood status coconut oil and plantation labor in American colonial Philippines. Prior occupation 1898, coconuts were a local crop that offered small growers degree protection from capitalist agriculture. A mere two decades later, plantations occupied more than million acres land; copra – dried kernels which is pressed was archipelago’s third major export industry; industry employed at least four people along commodity chain included prisoners, landed planters, refiners. Transimperial tropical research stations, economic botany, penal farms propelled this change. US-run prison southern Philippines served as living laboratories for racial management bioengineering trees bearing fruit all year. Though trade comprised production modern extractive capitalism, dairy farmers vegetable producers racialized imports threat white body politic during global Great Depression. Yet conflation imagined primitive positioned its rerendering an unrefined natural health food. By connecting planation coconut’s status, shows how discourses risk are consumed. Indeed, not laborer who risks exposure fertilizers pesticides nor loss biodiversity North consumers consider when asked if