Why bananas as we know them might go extinct (again) By Jacopo Prisco, for CNN
Fifty
years ago, we were eating better bananas.
They tasted better, they
lasted longer, they were more resilient and didn't require artificial ripening.
They were -- simply put -- a better fruit, because they belonged to a different
species.
It was until 1965.
That year, it was declared
commercially extinct due to the Panama disease, a fungal disease that started
out from Central America and quickly spread to most of the world's commercial
banana plantations, leaving no other choice but to burn them down.
The banana industry was in
deep crisis, and had to look for alternatives. It settled with the Cavendish
cultivar, which was deemed an inferior product but carried the distinction of
being immune to the disease. It was quickly adopted by banana growers
worldwide.
Today, the Cavendish is a
universal foodstuff, much like a Big Mac: supermarket bananas are pretty much
identical anywhere you buy them.
That's because they have
nearly no genetic diversity -- the plants are all clones of one another. The
Cavendish is a monoculture, which means it's the only variety that most
commercial growers plant every year. Which is also why it is now under threat
itself, from a new strain of the Panama disease. And once it infects one plant,
it can infect them all.
Fifty years on, one of the
most popular commercial foods in the world is once again under threat.
There are hundreds of
banana varieties in the world, but the Cavendish alone accounts for nearly the
totality of exports.
Starting in the late 1980s,
banana growers realized more diversity was needed to prevent the problem from
happening again. They were begging their bosses for it, but it never happened.
The disease now has a
different name, "Tropical Race 4," and it started out in Malaysia
around 1990, but it's otherwise very similar to the one that wiped out the Gros
Michel. It's caused by a really common type of fungus.
Since its "second
coming," TP4 has spread to South-east Asia, then across
thousands of miles of open ocean to Australia and finally, in 2013, to Africa.
Its recent discovery in the
Middle East and in Nampula, Mozambique, indicates that the disease is spreading
and threatening bananas worldwide.
It's a serious threat to
livelihoods and food security in the province, country and the continent,
should it spread. In Africa, bananas are critical for food security and income
generation for more than 100 million people.
Even though the disease
appears to have spread to just two plantations in Mozambique, the impact on the
local economy is already severe:
A total of 230,000 plants
have been affected and destroyed. At the current rate of infection, the farm is
losing 15,000 plants per week, translating to $236,000 per week.
The East and Central Africa
region has over 50% of its permanent crop area under banana cultivation. That's
around half of the African total, with an annual production of 20.9 million
tonnes valued at $ 4.3 billion. Bananas are an indispensable part of life in
this region providing up to one fifth of the total calorie consumption per
capita. If TR4 were to spread into this region, the effects would be
unimaginable.
There is also an issue of
consumer trust associated with the discovery of the disease, One of the biggest
threats is the negative perception that the rest of the world may have on
perceived risk of the African banana. Although the spread of the pathogen
through the fruit is almost nil, possible rejection of African banana exports
could seriously damage the banana business in Africa.
The banana industry is in
denial about this, and standard agricultural quarantines like fencing the crops
and cleaning the equipment are not enough.
The only solution would be
to burn the plantation down and start over, but with a different crop.
Restarting with bananas doesn't work because the fungus stays in the soil.
Ultimately, history could
well repeat itself and prompt banana growers to look for a new alternative.
There is no good candidate at the moment, but hybrids and GMOs are being considered.
The disease is not the only
problem, though. Over the past two decades the Cavendish has
pushed out and replaced many of those. And when you replace a varied
multiculture with a monoculture, if a disease happens, you're in trouble:
nature comes back and bites you.
Monoculture to me is just
as much a disease as TP4. Hopefully its dominance
won't lead to its downfall.