Taipei Travel

Bananas are not only a common cash crop grown throughout the tropics, but are also a product with inescapable connections to the methods of colonial agriculture and governance from the last century. Bananas bore witness to the Japanese Empire’s desire for expansion, forming a constituent part of both the colonial act of extraction in the name of trade and its subsequent collapse. In the present day context, if the relationship between value and price is always steadily diverging, and given our constantly evolving understanding of the nature of transactions, can the trust mechanisms of current economic and financial models ever create the effective conditions for constructive utopia building? And if such systems are structurally primed for collapse, then what might our possible escape routes be?