The Only Way to Save Your Beloved Bananas Might Be Genetic Engineering
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2015/12/hate-gmos-then-prepare-kiss-bananas-goodbye"Bananas have reached such all-star status in the American diet that we now consume more of them than apples every year. Yet you're probably used to seeing just one type of banana at your supermarket: the relatively bland yellow Cavendish. It has high yields, ships pretty well, and ripens slowly, making it appetizing to global food distributors.
Unfortunately, the popularity of the Cavendish might also be its downfall. A nasty and incurable fungus known as Tropical Race 4 (TR4) has spread in Cavendish-producing countries around the world, and it could be making its way straight toward banana heartland: Latin America, which produces 80 percent of the world's exports.
For a paper published in November in the journal PLOS Pathogens, researchers confirmed that the version of TR4 afflicting bananas in different countries around the globe—including China, the Philippines, Jordan, Oman, and Australia—appears to come from a single clone. Ever since the fungus migrated from Asia and Australia into Africa and the Middle East starting in 2013, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has urged countries to step up their quarantining of sick plants. Yet the Pathogens paper confirms that these quarantines, seemingly the only prevention against the spread of the fungus, which can live in soil for up to 50 years, have mostly failed. "It indicates pretty strongly that we've been moving this thing around," says professor James Dale, one of the world's experts on bananas and the director of the Queensland University of Technology's Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities. "It hasn't just popped up out of the blue."
The finding seems to confirm every banana grower's worst fear: that the Cavendish will go down the same way our old favorite banana did. A century ago, Americans ate only Gros Michel bananas, said to have more complex flavor and a heartier composition than today's Cavendish variety. Then, the monoculture fell prey to the fungal disease Tropical Race 1, or "Panama disease," which wiped out the crop around the globe. There was nothing anything could do to stop it.
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Noting the anti-GMO movement's unethical attacks on research of the banana developed to contain more vitamin A, as part of an attempt to save lives, this story seems somewhat relevant, even if it's a couple months old.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Maybe the banana technicians & corporate managers haven't yet figured out what chemical toxins to spray on their GMO bananas (so they can maximize profits from secondary inputs) but chances are they will. The big bucks are in the chemical inputs.
Here's the GMO glyphosate universe in a nutshell (or banana peel):
"Glyphosate-resistant crops represent more than 80% of the 120 million ha of transgenic crops grown annually worldwide..." http://www.agbioforum.org/v12n34/v12n34a10-duke.htm
welcome to DU!
But the English speaking world has known this since at least the Great Famine of the 1840s, Other cultures have known it much longer, even the pre-corporate, pre-imperial English.
Some of those wonderful agriculture corporations that fund genetic modifications thrive on monoculture. They call it "market share" and other fucked up unsustainable Wall Street economic bullshit.
But if one crop fails it's a pretty good idea to be growing other crops that won't fail. It's also a good idea to have a wide variety of home-grown seeds on hand, adapted to the quirks of the local environment, ready to plant next season just in case that delivery from Monster Seed Inc. gets put on hold for some unexpected reason.
I'm not going to cry for the Cavendish banana. I will cry for the workers in those plantations whose lives go from suckage to worse suckage, all for market "efficiency" and "productivity" that have no relation to scientific reality, but are in fact the practices of a bizarre religious cult that is destroying the very environment that supports humankind.
No technology is going to save any of us from the consequences of our collective stupidity. We'll burn more fossil fuels, we'll continue with our ignorant (but very "profitable"
agricultural practices until one way or another it's our turn to be kicked in the head by Mother Nature, just like all the people on the Cavendish banana plantations are getting kicked in the head right now.
Someone is always dangling a fucking "technological fix" in front of our faces, even as they are tearing the place apart and pissing on us. Things on earth are already incredibly horrid for the non-human people we share the planet with, people like orangutans and orcas, and already horrid for billions of human people living without any prospect of a better world for themselves or their children, except of walking or taking a dangerous boat ride to some place that might not be as bad.
I hate to disparage innate (and often deadly) human optimism, but technology isn't inherently good or evil, and all of it has unintended consequences. We always seem to be just so surprised when our clever "solutions" to problems turn out to be the next problem, a problem that's even worse.
Ultimately there is hope. Exponential population growth in a species always ends. We can end it on our own terms, in the most gentle, humane and rational way we can, or we can do nothing and let nature do the job in her usual grim manner, which in traditional human societies also involves a lot of fighting between and within tribes.
Oh well, maybe I should get serious about my guitar playing. Maybe I can someday be like this guy:
Or maybe, at least, my skull could decorate some monster truck. This blood bag put up a good fight, he did!
But let's be realistic. My basic nature is crazy homeless guy. Maybe that's a survival skill in rough times. Maybe I shouldn't have changed majors in college from engineering to evolutionary biology. I could be dreaming of genetically engineered rice, fusion power plants, and spaceships, but instead I'm looking around thinking, "oh no, not this shit again."
This planet has seen many of innovative species come and go. We're just one more.
It sure would be nice if we humans could simply be kind to one another and all those other species we share the planet with. Wouldn't it be great if all those people working on pesticide drenched Cavendish banana plantations could now find better things to do?
Ah, fuck it, what kind of dream is that? Let's genetically engineer a cure because bland boring bananas at 79 cents a pound are the most fucking important thing in this Biggest Baddest Banana of the world's banana republics.
Well said, Hunter. Thank you for your comment. As you observe, there are many - including many here on DU - who do not want to know, or who think for one reason or another that they cannot afford to know.
Avidyā is a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning is "ignorance", "delusion", "unlearned", "unwise" and opposite of, Vidya.
... Who's hand is inside your 
sock.
Yummy. Inedible seeds and mush.
Indeed. I was in my mid-30s before I discovered that bananas have flavor, in Hawai'i. They have several local varieties, of which the most popular is the "apple banana", which does not taste at all like apples. 
A friend had an ice cream banana plant in his yard; no, they did not taste like Ben & Jerry's, except possibly Chunky Monkey.
This has been known for some time. Why is there not another variety waiting to take over for the Cavendish?
Factoid: The demise of the Gros Michel gave rise to the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas".
Last edited Thu Mar 3, 2016, 03:03 PM - Edit history (1)
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751
On edit: It is interesting that, in an era where boutique groceries are all the rage, no one has pushed for more acreage of other bananas. Whole Foods could make quite a tidy profit, I'm sure.
