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Bye Bye Bananas — the Return of Panama Disease
Ant sends in a disturbing report in The Scientist on an imminent threat to worldwide banana production. "The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one — known as the Gros Michel — was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct. Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies — Chiquita and Dole — because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease... [Now] Panama disease — or Fusarium wilt of banana — is back, and the Cavendish does not appear to be safe from this new strain, which appeared two decades ago in Malaysia, spread slowly at first, but is now moving at a geometrically quicker pace. There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says that though Panama disease has yet to hit the banana crops of Latin America, which feed our hemisphere, the question is not if this will happen, but when. Even worse, the malady has the potential to spread to dozens of other banana varieties, including African bananas, the primary source of nutrition for millions..."
According to Banana.com there are over 300 different species of bananas, not all edible. I'm fairly certain that not all the edible species will be susceptibe to the blight. This might actually be a good thing in the long run as different species have different flavors and textures. They may even be better for us from a nutritional perspective than the Cavendish. The growers will need to adapt if the blight can't be stopped or contained.
Invenio via vel creo
Single, cloned fruit, unable to reproduce except by human intervention, with identical genetic structure in virtually all examples, cloned and distributed worldwide for decades is susceptible to the same attacking fungus that attacked the previous single, cloned fruit with identical genetic structure, but which has mutated slightly (my conjecture) in order to attack it's replacement.
And all because people don't like seeds in their fruit? (I would guess this isn't true, most probably people wouldn't really care much anyway, given that the fruit has an inedible skin too and a lot of popular fruits have seeds).
It's hardly surprising, it's only "catastrophic" because we've deliberately propogated a single, genetically-identical (and I would hazard "faulty", due to it's inability to reproduce) plant over and over and over again.
The problem is that all banana plants around today are sterile. The only way to cultivate new plants is by cuttings (taking a small section of an existing plant and growing it into a big plant). Consequently there is no way to introduce new variations. If all the varieties around today become susceptible to disease then that's it, they're gone. For those of us in the west that's just one less choice in the supermarket, but there are vast swathes of the world where the banana is the staple carbohydrate source for millions of people. It'd be like the west no longer having anything to make flour for bread, and having no alternative. Anyone who thinks this isn't a huge problem is wrong.
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They are not all quite sterile... you do get a seed for every few hundred pounds of bananas.
That said, you are essentially right. All cavendish bananas are clones, this makes them very vulnerable to disease.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
This post 2 down the row will answer you question nicely:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=570567&cid=23624829
We just don't eat - or get offered to eat - the other 299 species.
Snopes basically said the exact same thing. The cavendish bananna will be extinct. Snopes is playing semantics by saying that all bananas won't be effected, but the only one eaten by americans is the cavendish, so yes, the bananna as we know it will be extinct. Just like the bananna your grandparents knew is already extinct.
Read more carefully. There's more than that in there.
The fungus discussed here grows in the earth, and spreads through earth. In fact, it is a problem _because_ it's in the ground, so you can't just spray the leaves with some fungicide.
So the only way this fungus could make the jump across the ocean to Latin America is either by
A) someone bringing an infected plant and planting it in the middle of a plantation, or
B) someone bringing a sack of infected earth and dumping it in a plantation. That's it, really.
And the cultivars _are_ aware of the threat, so they:
A) don't import any plants, but only clone plants which are known to be healthy. (They actually check, yes.) And
B) don't import soil from anywhere. And apparently the countries which depend on bananas for their economy, have special customs regulations to forbid exactly that.
Just about the only realistic scenario I can think of where that jump could happen, is, basically, an act of terror or sabotage. I.e., someone deliberately bringing some infected soil and spreading it around in Latin America. It could happen, I guess, but it's hardly something that the cultivars can do much about in advance.
At any rate, that's the failure point of the "OMG, it's spreading exponentially" scare. It can spread all it want somewhere else, as long as it can't cross the ocean by itself, it's even less of a threat to the Latin American plantation than Al Qaeda deciding to crash an airplane into a plantation.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Unfortunately none of those dozens of varieties have the attributes that make the Cavendish banana by far the most successful and important fruit crop in the world:
1. Long shelf life
2. Very uniform and predictable ripening times
That is why you can get bananas cheaply, even though they might be grown thousands of miles from where they are eventually sold.
Most, if not all the other varieties are only viable crops when they are sold very close to where they were grown.
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The Alaska Science Forum did an article on this problem back in 1990. Unfortunately I haven't found the promised followup. This contains a lot more information than the wikipedia articles.
Basically it involves information on why the bananas are hard to breed for a better strain. (they have no seeds) The Honduras Foundation for Agricultural Research has found way of crossbreeding in wild strains to produce seeds. Looks like it's slow going, but genetic mutation is pretty much the only way to engineer in resistance to new disease, and that will require seeds, not cuttings.
I wasn't able to find any updates on the HFAR's progress. Anyone else have any luck?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8MDNFaGfT4
First hit on google
Meme that went around the internet 4-5 years ago.
So true. If I remember correctly, Uganda has about 40 different kinds of banana. Not all of them are for eating, but still the variety is pretty big. Except for those which are for cooking, most bananas aren't as big as we are used to get them, but certainly more tasty.
Idha khatabahum lijahiluna qalu salaman
Er, it's a staple but I'd be surprised if it's THE staple. In Africa, which this story mentioned, the east and south live off maize flour and in the west there's a lot of rice, and a big root I think is Cassava. Sure you get plantain and banana, but certainly not with every meal.
It's older than that. I read about it in a magazine years ago. The smallish bananas that you see in the supermarket are part of an aggressive breeding program to get ahead of the disease.
The truth is banana plants haven't been propagated by seed, and only recently (past five years) have there been attempts to find new cultivars, before the bottom falls out of the banana industry.
cat sig >
bananas are supposed to be picked green. they get woody (tough with bitter flavor) if left on the tree to ripen. To get them to be sweeter the blossom is cut off after an incomplete row of banana hands is made which concentrates the growth into the existing bananas instead of attempts to make more.
Get a web developer
If you RTFS then you will see that while 'we' in developed countries will be ok without bananas they make up a large part of the food supply for some people in Africa. This will likely have a massive effect on people who don't have the luxury to choose what they eat day to day.
Then you've only had plantains one of the two ways in which they're eaten. I agree that green plantains aren't my cup of tea. In my opinion they're like overly firm and starchy potatoes with a hint of banana flavouring to them. After a week of traveling Panama, I never wanted to see them again.
However, if you let plantains ripen until they're black (at which point, they're still perfectly edible, unlike bananas) and then peel them, cut them into long slices, and cook them in butter, they're incredibly sweet and delicate.
More in line with the original post, there are several varieties of bananas that I find much more delicious than the Cavendish variety. I've had the pleasure of eating several other varieties while abroad that I really enjoyed; for example, apple bananas have got a firmer, more flavourful meat to them, and I strongly prefer them to Cavendish. Cavendish bananas, although I love them, can be a bit dull tasting and mushy.
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Well, first of all, here's an article from 2003 that looks like it might have been on the money
Second of all, most banana plants are grown from cuttings - without the reproduction mutations resistant to these fungal infections are simply not happening on any kind of scale. "The problem is that the banana we eat is a seedless, sterile article which could slip the way of its predecessor which was wiped out by blight half a century ago."
They're sequencing the genome of the bananas eaten in africa (which HAVE seeds) but there are problems because people aren't interested in the GM varieties, saying they taste more like apple (no bad thing to me)
Rational thought is the only true freedom
A little of Cinnamon, cloves, chili powder, a couple of green chilies, a clove of garlic, a pinch of turmeric and a little bit of coriander powder and mint leaves if you can find them.
I'd recommend mixing the spices and adding some mustard seeds to the oil before frying the plantains.
Also, adding grated coconut after the spice is settled in adds a nice flavor. You could either cook it in oil, or add butter for a slightly different flavor.
Or, if you know of an Indian store nearby, you could buy a generic brand of curry powder or Sambar powder and that will save you the trouble of the first section altogether. Your choice of spice will quite obviously affect the taste, but I've found that varying the spices provides me with variety, and plantains seem to taste alright as long as you don't over-spice or over-cook them.
Cheers.
That's not quite true. Cavendish bananas are the Wonder Bread of bananas. Most people who have tried other varieties think they're a bland shadow of what bananas should be.
On the other hand, they're easy to grow and ship in large quantities. They're the only variety that you can harvest, ship half way around the world, and have then all ripen at the same time (right after they get to your local megamart).
There was a Scientific American podcast about the demise of the banana on April 23, 2008. It was interesting--they actually went down to South America and took a tour of a banana farm. There are some photos on the site as well.
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=7BA7726C-EBE6-29DB-B21F7FF464B293E9
Family guy was spoofing the Internet meme, and was actually quite late to the party. PB&J time was on the decline by then.
It's a soil fungus, it only goes as far as the roots. It kills the whole banana plant -- there's no fruit for you to try, fungus or not.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.