Headlines have been blaring that the banana will be extinct within 10 years but crop specialists say that's not likely. The furor has called attention, however, to a problem of worldwide banana supply and to the possibility that we'll be peeling things a little different in 2013.
The fuss started with the Jan. 18 New Scientist cover proclaiming, "The world's favorite fruit is about to disappear," and a story featuring Emile Frison, the director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain in Montpellier, France. The notion sped around the world via stories in newspapers from Uganda's Kampala Monitor to the Boston Globe (Pearce, 2003).
Saying that the banana is likely to disappear is overstating the case, says Frison. What he was actually talking about, was the trouble with banana breeding in general and the particular plight of a beauty called Cavendish. This banana variety yields abundant crops, ripens uniformly on command, turns a lovely yellow, and tastes exactly the way most imported-banana eaters expect the fruit to taste. This is the top banana on supermarket shelves in Europe and North America.
Cavendish's history has now come back to haunt it. It took over the international banana trade some 50 years ago, when a strain of the dreaded fungal wilt called Panama disease started killing the previous export star, a banana called ”Gros Michel”. The fungus grows into and chokes a plant's water vessels. Leaves brown from the margins, and the plants wilt and die. The fungus lurks in the soil, so once a field is infected, the disease is very hard to control. Originally, Panama disease could knock out Cavendish bananas at the chilly fringes of their range but not in the tropical heart of banana territory.
Bananas are vulnerable for the same reason they're seedless: they're the descendants of sterile mutants of.............
