Bananas, many readers of ksjtracker may have heard, are facing a slow collapse of their own – not today, but faster than the one in the news yesterday and featuring the disintegration of most of East West Antarctica's ice sheets in the next century or three. A blight called Panama disease has spread from Asia to Australia and recently has popped up in Africa (bananas are old world plants). It is an incurable fungus, easily transferred place to place in dirt, and it appears set to wipe out the near-clonal monoculture that supports the bulk of the international trade in bananas.
Read the latest here in this story, full of surprises:
- Popular Science- Dan Koeppel: Has the End Of The Banana Arrived? ; The answer to be found here is, surprise: NO. But the only banana most of us have ever known may be on the way out, perhaps within a decade or two. (The reason this post starts with reference to glacier problems in Antarctica is that while I was reading a story on that news at PopSci the eye fell on this banana yarn.)
Koeppel is the man to consult about banana news despite the somewhat misleadingly dire headline above. He reports on bananas quite a bit. Nine years ago (he tells us in this yarn) he first reported on the fungus for PopSci. He has written the book, too. Plus, he blogs on bananas.
I was surprised to learn – I bet I'd heard this before (as in this NYTimes story, another that Koeppel wrote) but forgot – that the international banana trade had a chance once before to learn the perils of depending entirely on one strain of any crop. The banana that made Chiquita Banana famous is not the banana piled up in American supermarkets today. Until about fifty years ago, we ate Big Mikes, more formally known as the Gros Michel banana. Its giant plantations got wiped out by a fungus similar to the one now turning our current banana, the Cavendish, to a rotten mess. Did you know, that by almost universal account, the previous bananas tasted much better than today's? So it says here. Eating wise we are second banana at best.
A bigger surprise was to read in this account that while Cavendish bananas may define banana to most Americans, they account for a bit less than half of all bananas grown in the world. Most are grown for local consumption. Many of those other banana strains are resistant to Panama Disease, aka Fusarium wilt. Banana breeders are trying to find or create a variant that tastes great, tolerates shipping and handling plus a few weeks between picking and peeling, and ideally when ripe would have yellow skin and pale, somewhat sweet flesh. This may be a risky time to invest in the banana trade. Hard times ahead – and this blight or another could mean serious privation in parts of the tropics where bananas and their kin (plantain for one) are dietary staples – but one guesses they will persist in markets around the world. Koeppel has gotten to be a connoisseur of bananas – he tells readers that multiple varieties of many colors are on sale in India. Most taste much better than the Cavendishes that locals dismiss as hotel bananas. Eventually, he declares, a diverse international banana industry based upon multiple cultivars is the most likely tactic to work in the long haul.
The story got me curious about the previous top banana, the Gros Michel. Turns out some survive. Some countries even grow them in quantity enough for export.
Grist for the Mill: ProMusa, a banana trade organization.
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