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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..."
Will this finally be the end of "Peanut Butter Jelly Time"?
but it is also solved by genetic variation. the story is a little hysterical, as african varieties are also genetically different enough to resist the new cavendish-hungry fungus. not that the african varieties can't be attacked, but the emphasis is on african VARIETIES: more genetic variation means more resistance to the weakness of monoculture
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Slow news day? I think any story about a major threat to our food supply to be a major one, plus it mentions "Banana Scientists"! What is there not to love?
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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
This story pops up every 6 months or so (I guess not here, but in general)... Has no one else heard about this banana scare story about 10 times before?? There's even a snopes article about it. Banana Extinction
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.
think of the monkeys !
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
So, was granpa's banana more slippery? 'Cos that would explain their widespread use as comic devices in the pre-television era. (And, no, I never thought about asking Grandma about Granpa's banana, codenamed "Big Mike." Pervert.)
I know it's against the rules but if you RTFA the interesting part isn't about the blight spreading through the bananas. As others have posted this is not something that sprang up over night, it's been coming for quite a while now.
The truly interesting part is that the banana companies in S. America still don't see this as a problem. TFA says that in their anual summaries they don't even mention this disease much less list it as a threat. I think the issue is much more about these companies' failure to act before it's too late than that nature is running its course.
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
Exactly, how does extinction / loss of a food supply / mutating desease which have earlier almost killed a whole industry become small news? I would more likely find it the biggest news this day on Slashdot, time will tell.
I guess he just don't eat bananas.
Having traveled in some tropical countries, one of the things I most remember about their fruits are the sheer NUMBER of different banana varieties. No monoculture. Your average roadside stand would have half a dozen varieties, and the one a mile down the road would have a few more. Tomorrow the mix would be different. And most of them would taste a lot better than the crap that's so widely available elsewhere!
I for one will welcome our new polycultural bananalords.
What other animated emoticon can I use to signal that I have an erection?
Monstar L
Is anyone else wondering what exactly it was about this Big Michael guy that caused someone to name a large and tasty banana after him...?
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.
Technically, that was worth a thousand words.
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.
siener's youtube channel
I live in Brazil where there are many types of bananas available. Any supermarket has at least three different types. Just off my head, I can name at least six types of Brazilian bananas: Ouro ("gold"), Prata ("silver"), d'Agua ("water"), Maçã ("apple"), Nanica ("dwarf"), da Terra ("earth").
Why? because this news is OVER 3 months old. I heard it on NPR "science friday" back in Late April early May! it has been covered heavily in all the earth science and microbiological journals for nearly 3 months now and yes those have covered how it's spreading even faster.
It's like Slashdot waiting until the end of the month to announce, "Mars polar lander made it to the ground and is sending pictures!"
So yes, it's a slow news day as it's a rehash of old news that has had wide coverage.
Next up, The MIR space station is going to be decommissioned, and spacelab will fall from the sky.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says..."
Anyone else burst out laughing after reading the title of banana scientist? This picture came to mind...
http://www.zenbutoh.com/charactergallery/images/gorilla-bananas.jpg
While this might not seem so serious to consumers in the U.S., in fact the banana family (including plantains) is the 4th largest food staple crop in the world (or at least it was several years ago when I was researching the banana industry for a litigation matter) behind wheat, rice, and corn.
Food for thought.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
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 >
No, the correct term is 'Bananologist'!
My blog
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.
Meat and saturated fat were linked to heart disease which is now considered non-causative: contributory only. Only highly processed meats are still linked to cancers. Red meat is linked to male infertility but only because of beef hormone usage.
Salmonella infects 1 in 20,000 eggs, and generally only if the shell is cracked. For years it was supposed to cause heart disease, onyl for the WHO to establish that the more you eat the longer you live.
Margarine was supposed to be heart healthy and turned out to be the opposite.
Same with vegetable oils, but which cause cancer in lab animals (triggering an attempt to industrially convert polyunsaturates to monounsaturated oils).
I reckon there are two general rules: when is doubt do the opposite of what the experts tell you, and the second to establish what is anthropologically natural to us rather than chasing novel elixirs. After all, you can't be moderate or balanced with poisons (like margarine, a sort of plasticised oil).
... which would be preferable to bananas falling out of your bottom I suppose...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
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
Chiquita Brands International still isn't a "harmless" international company. The company was fined by the US Justice Department, to the tune of $25 million, for paying extortion fees to Colombian rebels between 1997 and 2004 (though the company has a history of doing this back to 1989). Granted, perhaps Chiquita was screwed if it did or screwed if it didn't-- I am not familiar with the details.
This "news" has been around for a long time. Even the summary says so. It's an old story: monoculture -> disease -> no more bananas. Unless you have zero knowledge of bananas, you heard about this years ago. Hmm, I wonder why they'd be raising the alarm now, even when the banana companies like Dole and Chiquita don't care?
Oh, I see. Somebody wants to skirt regulations regarding transgenic crops. "Won't somebody think of the bananas!!" ... Suckers.
This is correct. There are hundreds, if not thousands of varieties of bananas. The reason we don't see them is that many of them aren't as good as the Cavendish; and none of the many varieties that are better store and ship well. So consumers in India and Central America will continue to have access to superior, locally grown varieties.
However -- this doesn't mean that we should blithely accept the extinction of an important food crop. This is a warning. What if it were rice? Or sweet corn?
The properties that make bananas vulnerable are shared by many other, more important food crops. Mainly these amount to one thing: the crop in question is economically attractive to plant on a large scale and ship around the world.
It's important that we look at this as both a lesson, and an opportunity to try out different strategies to respond. The global food supply is already under pressure from energy prices and population growth. It should be manageable over the coming decades, but we shouldn't trust our luck too much.
This also bears watching because bananas are an extremely important food source in areas where they grow. Even though this is not a variety that is used as a basic staple by anybody, the biology of banana diseases is very important.
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