Why bananas as we know them might go extinct

Fifty years ago, we were eating better bananas. They tasted better, they lasted longer and didn’t require artificial ripening. They were – simply put – a better fruit, because they belonged to a different species, or cultivar. It was called Gros Michel and it remained the world’s export banana until 1965.

That year, it was declared extinct due to the Panama disease, a fungal disease that started out from Central America and quickly spread to the world’s 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 inferior but was immune to the disease. It was quickly adopted by banana growers worldwide.

Today, the Cavendish is a universal foodstuff: 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 banana growers plant every year. It alone accounts for nearly all the banana exports worldwide.

This is why the Cavendish is now under threat itself, from a new strain of the Panama disease. And once it infects one plant, it can infect them all.

The disease now has a different name, “Tropical Race 4” or TR4, and it started out in Malaysia around 1990, but it’s otherwise very similar to the one that wiped out the Gros Michel. The fungus spreads like wildfire and it can be transported easily by wind, water and even cars. It affects the banana plant’s vascular system, preventing it from picking up water.

The TP4 has since spread to Southeast Asia, then across thousands of miles of open ocean to Australia and in 2013, to Africa. Although there are ways to effectively control the disease, such as agricultural quarantines like fencing the crops and cleaning the equipment thoroughly, banana farmers are worried that there may be a lack of financial resources for that to happen.

The only solution would be to burn the plantation down and start over, not with bananas but a different crop. Restarting with bananas doesn’t work because the fungus stays in the soil.

So does this spell the end of the banana as we know it? Ultimately, history could well repeat itself and prompt banana growers to look for a new alterative that is resistant to both the Panama and TR4 diseases. There is no good candidate at the moment, but hybrids and GMOs (genetically modified organisms) are being considered.

(All images - credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)