Is the a-crop-alypse upon us?
Enjoy your nanners while you can: Scientists warn that the most popular type of banana could be on the brink of extinction due to a disease outbreak that’s ravaging the potassium-filled fruit.
“Nobody is even close to solving the problem,” Dan Koeppel, author of the book “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World,” told Business Insider.
The Cavendish banana — the ubiquitous supermarket variety that comprises nearly half of all bananas humans consume — is under attack from a vicious fungal infection called Panama disease (Fusarium wilt) tropical race 4.
This banana blight reportedly originates in the tree’s roots and metastasizes to the rest of the plant, starving it of food and water until it eventually dies. Think: a fruit version of the fungal epidemic from “The Last of Us.”
First discovered in Taiwan in 1989, tropical race 4, also called TR4, has since spread to Australia, then India and China — the world’s largest banana producers — as well as the Middle East and Africa.
Meanwhile, the disease most recently reared its head in South America, according to James Dale, a professor and leader of the banana biotechnology program at Queensland University of Technology.
“Once it’s in a country it’s very hard to get rid of it,” said Dan Bebber, a biosciences lecturer at the University of Exeter, in 2019.
This pandemic could spell farm-ageddon for the global banana market.
While there are over 1,000 species of the crescent-shaped fruit, 47% of all bananas consumed by people are of the Cavendish strain.
Here’s hoping they don’t become so rare that a single banana sells for $120,000, a la the work by avant-garde Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
This potential extirpation is somewhat ironic given that the species was bred for, among other factors, its resistance to disease.
After another popular variety of the fruit called Gros Michel was wiped out by tropical race 1 (TR4’s predecessor) in the early 20th century, the Cavendish variety soared due to its immunity to race 1, eventually becoming the most widely exported strain.
Fortunately, experts believe they can prevent Cavendish from going the way of Gros Michel before it’s too late.
“We have at least a decade before the impact is drastic,” declared Dale. “I would say with certainty that there will be a solution before the export market for Cavendish is severely affected.”
Possible solutions include genetically modified versions that are resistant to TR4, fruit grafting — transplanting tissues between plants to imbue them with different characteristics such as disease resilience.
Meanwhile, some scientists in Taiwan are experimenting with exposing Cavendish seedlings to TR4 to make them resistant, like a banana vaccine.
However, Koeppel argued that these are temporary fixes rather than long-term solutions as the aforementioned measures wouldn’t inoculate bananas against a new disease strain — as was the case with the Cavendish.
Koeppel said solving the problem would involve mass producing and hawking multiple banana varieties because genetic diversity makes the fruit less vulnerable to disease.
“The answer is going to be the end of monoculture,” the scientist declared. “The answer is variety.”