{"id":298,"date":"2011-11-12T19:07:12","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T19:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=298"},"modified":"2022-04-17T05:05:45","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T05:05:45","slug":"slouching-toward-bananapocalypse-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/?p=298","title":{"rendered":"Slouching Toward Bananapocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published in Grist<\/a>, November 12, 2011<\/em><\/p>\n

For years journalists have warned of imminent banana extinction. \u201cGet bananas while you still can,\u201d wrote New Scientist over five years ago. \u201cThe world\u2019s most popular fruit \u2026 is in deep trouble,\u201d it went on to say, adding that the banana would probably be out of supermarkets by 2013, and would soon exist only in backyard gardens and other places the Panama Race IV, a pathogen taking out plantations in Southeast Asia, couldn\u2019t reach.<\/p>\n

But today \u2014 just a few years from the banana\u2019s supposed demise \u2014 one can walk down the street and find bananas in the nearest corner store, hanging out between the cash register and the lottery tickets. What gives? Are we still heading toward bananapocalypse? Or has it been cancelled? And what can the banana tell us about the evolution of our global food supply?<\/p>\n

It turns out that the Race IV fungus does cause a true bananapocalypse. It just hasn\u2019t spread everywhere \u2014 yet. Once it shows up on a farm, the land around it can\u2019t be used to grow the same variety for another 30 years. And, given that there\u2019s only one variety of banana \u2014 the Cavendish \u2014 that ships well enough and tastes good enough to be sold everywhere in the world, this is bad news for banana growers. The arrival of Race IV on your property is a sign that you\u2019ve officially left the international banana trade.<\/p>\n

But \u2014 to use a horror movie analogy \u2014 Race IV moves more like a zombie horde in a \u201970s movie than like the sleek, fast-moving zombies of today. In other words, smarter pathogens travel on insects (which can hop rides on ships and airplanes) or float on wind currents like Black sigatoka (the banana\u2019s main nemesis in the Americas), while Race IV travels by dirt, weeds, and water. Twenty years after the first plantations began to fail in Southeast Asia, the fungus has yet to be found in India and the Americas, which remain the most productive Cavendish growing regions in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019ll get there,\u201d says Randy Ploetz, a pathologist who researches tropical fruit diseases at the University of Florida. \u201cBut it\u2019s really overblown.\u201d In fact, he adds, \u201cWe\u2019ve got a banana glut right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

A little banana history<\/em><\/p>\n

Southeast Asia was never an ideal place to grow bananas commercially, says Ploetz. Because the banana evolved there, every parasite and pathogen that evolved alongside it is also hanging out there, waiting to attack it.<\/p>\n

Success in the globalized food trade has come to mean planting crops far away from where they evolved, in a climate as similar as possible, and then sitting back and collecting the profits until the pests show up. In the case of the banana, arguably the first globalized fruit, new markets have led to new growing regions. As Japan began to globalize, a few plantations were laid out in Taiwan. And when Saudi Arabia began to import bananas, residents made it clear that they would really prefer their bananas grown in an Islamic country \u2014 and suddenly there were plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia too.<\/p>\n

Race IV had probably been around for a long time, but it wasn\u2019t until these plantations went in that it had the expansion opportunity that a monoculture provides. It takes anywhere from nine months to several years for plants infected with Race IV to start showing signs of disease. And by the time the plantations in Malaysia began to fail, Race IV had been carried all over Southeast Asia \u2014 on weeds, through irrigation channels, and on the tire treads of trucks and the boot soles of workers. It only took five years after Race IV first appeared in Malaysia for the banana industry there to completely collapse. From there it spread to Taiwan, Indonesia, and Australia \u2014 though it has yet to reach Cambodia or Vietnam.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about the variety<\/em><\/p>\n

The Cavendish came about in the 1960s, when Dole and Chiquita were faced with a milder form of Panama Race IV. The Gros Michel \u2014 or \u201cBig Mike\u201d banana \u2014 which was the industry standard then, was being undone by what is now known as Panama Race I. So the industry giants made the unprecedented choice to sell the world on a new banana.<\/p>\n

It was widely agreed that Big Mike was the better banana. \u201cIf you look at old photos,\u201d says Ploetz, \u201cyou\u2019ll see workers throwing entire bunches of [Big Mikes] into the back of a car. You can\u2019t do that with a Cavendish.\u201d Also, he says, Big Mike tasted better. But Cavendish was ridiculously productive, and tasted good enough. It cost Chiquita and Dole millions of dollars to rip up and replant their plantations with Cavendish, and to re-engineer their boats, railroad cars, and packing systems to handle the new fruit \u2014 but it ensured that the banana would continue to lead the global fruit market, as the *cough* top banana.<\/p>\n

But, here\u2019s the thing: There is no new banana variety waiting in the wings to replace the Cavendish. The E.U. has made it clear that it has no interest in buying a genetically engineered (GMO) banana. Another variety [PDF], produced by cross-breeding samples from more than 350 banana types, was given the astonishingly awesome name of \u201cGoldfinger.\u201d It has sold well in Australia, but doesn\u2019t travel well after harvest in the tropics.<\/p>\n

On top of it, the Cavendish is \u201creproductively-challenged.\u201d So the quest to produce a variety that is resistant to Race IV but tastes, looks, and grows like a Cavendish, is a somewhat Quixotic one. (After putting 400 tons of Cavendish through a sieve, a research team in Honduras managed to extract only 15 seeds.) Since Race IV takes out not only Cavendish, but many other related varieties, the odds don\u2019t look good. Another research team in Taiwan stresses Cavendish plant tissues until they mutate slightly, then grows the resulting plants. They\u2019ve managed to produce a Cavendish which can withstand the Race IV for four years (most banana plants live for about 15 years).<\/p>\n

Yes, we have no bananas<\/em><\/p>\n

In other words: so far, scientists have had no real luck. And unless they do, bananas will stop haunting corn flake bowls and fruit salads around the world. When Race IV reaches today\u2019s prime banana-growing regions, it\u2019s likely to be some combination of homesickness and air travel that does the industry in \u2014 a person who takes a shoot from a banana tree in their home country, puts it in a suitcase, and smuggles it into their new home. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be some idiot,\u201d says Ploetz. \u201cSomeone who goes home to visit their family and says, \u201cOh, the tree in my parents\u2019 backyard always had the most delicious fruit.\u201d
\nThat said, even if bananas disappear from supermarkets of Ohio, it won\u2019t mean the end of the fruit all together. After all, the Cavendish is only 50 percent of the world banana market. No one is quite sure how many other varieties make up that other half, but it\u2019s estimated to be 1,000.<\/p>\n

The 20th century was the era when we saw a few species \u2014 the Cavendish, the Russet potato, the Holstein cow \u2014 come to dominate world agriculture. The 21st century looks to be the era in which those great monocultures are gradually becoming undone. And while the hordes of other banana varieties may not be as productive, as easy to ship, nor as smooth and unblemished, their sheer difference from one another has the potential to shield them from pathogens carried by the humans who, in this century, travel as far and as readily as crops began to travel in the last one.<\/p>\n

Ploetz knows the Gros Michel tastes better than the Cavendish because he\u2019s eaten one. Not in a tightly controlled banana research center, but in a market in Costa Rica, where they\u2019re still grown on small farms and in people\u2019s back yards. The taste is sweeter, he reports. And more complex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are we still heading toward bananapocalypse? Or has it been cancelled?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":449,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions\/449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.strangerworks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}