
The Cavendish banana is slowly but surely being driven to extinction - tokenadult
http://qz.com/559579/the-worlds-favorite-fruit-is-slowly-but-surely-being-driven-to-extinction/
======
jacobolus
This article by the same author from March of last year (2014) is longer, and
does a more thorough job explaining the context and the threat:

[http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-
industry-...](http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is-
killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/) (and HN discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8296326))

I’d recommend just reading that one and skipping the current article, which
consists of a tiny bit of background wrapped around a link to the recent study
[http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/jo...](http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1005197)

~~~
pyre
> This article by the same article

The singularity has arrived! The articles are writing themselves! ;)

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mcv
Not all is bad, though. The Cavendish is not exactly the most tasty banana,
and all the replacements that people are looking at (Goldfinger, which is
shorter, thicker and straighter, Sedas, which is apparently a resistant Gros
Michel) are all tastier than the Cavendish.

~~~
cageface
Here in Vietnam I see at least half a dozen different kinds of bananas of all
shapes and sizes every time I go to the market. Most taste better than
American supermarket bananas too.

~~~
mcv
It was the same when I was on vacation in Indonesia. There's clearly a wealth
of bananas in south-east Asia. Most of them were really tiny though, and
probably hard to sell in the west.

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tzs
Bananas are astonishing. Compare them to apples, from the viewpoint of a North
American consumer.

1\. Bananas are grown thousands of miles away. Apples are typically grown
within a few hundred.

2\. Bananas have to be transported in refrigerated ships, trucks, and trains,
and even then only keep for a couple weeks after harvest. Apples are easy to
transport and keep for months.

Yet bananas are cheaper than apples!

How that came to be is covered in this interesting article:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/opinion/18koeppel.html?ref=opinion&_r=0)

~~~
yrro
> Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease
> has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not
> immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years,
> maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find
> either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough
> been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving
> little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

It astounds me that Big Banana has been "slow" to react, given that "By 1960,
the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly
bankrupt"!

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blisterpeanuts
This is horrible news. I love bananas and eat at least 365/year. I recently
got a blender so that I could make smoothies -- to fool my kid into eating
both a banana and a glass of milk in the morning :)

The article didn't make it clear, though, whether every variety of banana is
affected, or just the big yellow ones called "Cavendish". When I lived in
Taiwan (early 80s), there were all sorts of bananas -- Cavendish, little
yellow ones, little red ones. In fact these little reddish-skinned ones with a
tart yellow fruit grew in my back yard at the time. Really tasty.

Maybe it's time to install a small tropical greenhouse in the back yard and
grow one's own bananas. If mainstream bananas become scarce and expensive,
this could be like tomatoes -- everyone will want to grow them. A business
opportunity for someone, possibly.

~~~
apendleton
The particular problem strain of the Panama disease affects the Cavendish
specifically. This has happened before; the Cavendish, itself, only became the
dominant cultivar after other strains of the same disease killed the previous
dominant cultivar, the Gros Michel. All members of a given cultivar are
clones, so they're genetically identical and thus very susceptible to being
wiped out by disease as they have no mechanism to evolve resistance. We'll
probably just have to switch again.

------
im2w1l
Between seedbanks and genome sequencing, there is really no excuse for us
letting major (sub-)species go extinct anymore.

~~~
BrainInAJar
Cavendish are seedless, they only grow vegetatively. They are genetically
identical. That's the problem. Panama disease is a fungus. Fungi are nearly
impossible to eliminate.

------
1_player
If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend this article:

[http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-
of-t...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-
banana/)

In fact, I recommend any of their articles.

------
NN88
Didn't we have the gros michel?

~~~
msellout
Thus the song, "Yes, we have no bananas".

