Good research but as they point out, the much simpler solution is simply to grow a variety of different bananas instead of one clone across the entire earth.
I wonder if there is an ureported reason that they haven’t done that. Because I think your idea makes sense, and surely they must have a reason for not doing it.
My understanding is they store well and consumers are used to them. There are definitely many other varieties available in local markets in tropical areas, some of which are better tasting IMO. But it’s just one of those things about global commodity trade that they want them all to be identical.
The current banana is cheapest to transport. They can be harvested when still unripe and ripe along the way, so no expensive fast transport is needed. They’re are many other varieties, but this one was the easy moneymaker.
Not planting in monocultures for example?
Mixing with other crops might help already.
I assume this will once again be conversion to yet less tasty bananas.
If you’re in the United States and not in a tropical area, a website called Miami Fruit will ship you a banana sampler with some of the bananas you’ve been missing. Cavendish bananas are garbage.
$127 for 5 pounds of bananas, I live not too far from Miami I would be cheaper to drive there
yeah that is not my level of cashflow.
Mine neither, but they have sales and coupons once in awhile. My friends and I pitched in and we got about twenty pounds of exotic fruit for about $200, although it HAS been a few years. They might be price gouging like everyone else now.
I feel like sensationalist headlines like this only have a boy who cried wolf effect. Using words like “apocalypse”, really?
It’s already happened once.
The Big Mike banana was super popular until the 1950s, when a fungal infection basically wiped them out. (they’re still grown in a few places, but are super susceptible to infection)
So, the banana growers switched over to the Cavendish banana. It was resistant to the fungus.
But the days of the Cavendish were always numbered because of how they’re grown. A seedless banana can only grow via cuttings. Which is how they’ve been grown since the beginning. Every single banana on the shelf at your local supermarket is genetically identical. They’ve been identical since the 50s, and the fungus has adapted to them. Worse still, the particular fungus that’s now attacking the Cavendish cultivar is extremely resistant to fungicides.
So yeah, without some sort of massive shift in genetic diversity, the Banana will no longer be a thing in Central America. Do note, that the banana is not a native plant in the Americas, and is cultivated widely in Southeast Asia. So yeah, the Banana will not go extinct, but it will vanish from American and European stores.
Attempting to preserve this variety may not be very viable unless they genetically alter it, or keep a large enough population alive in a clean environment for a decade until all the other ones die and the fungus is diminished. Seems easier to just grow a different variety maybe, but not as commercially viable at that point? I don’t know enough about how/why bananas are as cheap as they are (aside from the awful bits of the industry).
