
The Banana As We Know It Is Dying Again - DrScump
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/12/27/banana-fungus-panama-disease/
======
chriskanan
I managed to get a banana cultivar called an ice cream banana [1] at a
farmer's market in Oahu, Hawaii. It was the best banana I've ever had. I wish
there was more of a willingness to explore selling a wider variety of bananas.
We have 5-10 kinds of apples in my local grocery store in New York and the
same is true for the other US states I've lived (including Oklahoma).

Why is only a single banana cultivar typically available in US stores when
there are multiple cultivars of apples, pears, and even avocados typically for
sale?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Java_banana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Java_banana)

~~~
cfontes
There are, in Brazil you get at least 3 to 5 bananas in every single market.

Some are more sweet like "Prata" some are bigger like "Nanica", some are
smaller like "Banana ouro" or one that smells somewhat like an apple called
"banana maça".

There is also one for cooking "Banana da terra" used to make fish dishes
mainly.

If you go to farmers there are even more.

It's probably a cultural thing, in the Netherlands you can find mainly 2
types, regular international one and the Cooking kind because of Asians
mostly, which makes me really sad, Australia is like that as well.

~~~
reubenmorais
"Caturra" and "nanica" are both types of Cavendish. They, as well as "prata"
and "maçã" are all part of group AAA and are affected by the fungus.

Just having more types on the market doesn't help, you need types that resist
the fungus.

------
abtinf
I've seen this story about the Cavendish banana for close to 20 years now. I
think the first time was on Slashdot in the late nineties or early aughts.
Every time, the article predicts the imminent death of the varietal.

The articles always make a persuasive case. So, why hasn't it happened yet?
What is the crucial detail that these articles always leave out?

~~~
ethbro
_> So, why hasn't it happened yet? What is the crucial detail that these
articles always leave out?_

This article makes the point. The fungus has no quick propogation methods, as
it's only spread by moving infected earth: it's simply very resilient once
established.

So the last X years have been a slow motion "We know this is a problem. It's
becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Eventually it will be an insurmountable
problem."

The article also notes that there were a substantial number of "flex years"
the last time this happened, as deforestation was used to open up new, un-
infected land for banana cultivation.

In summary: it's like the IPv6 problem.

We knew it was coming, but resource exhaustion takes time.

~~~
jeron
I love how a parallel can be drawn between bananas and IPV6

~~~
rev_null
Inedible Plantains Version 6?

~~~
wildflowero
Innocuous Plantains Version 6.

------
rorykoehler
In south east Asia we get many different types of banana. I've come to prefer
many of the less sweet varieties. If the Cavendish goes extinct my hope would
be that we stop this mono-culture nonsense and embrace variety much like we
have with apples etc.

~~~
gumby
This was a big disappointment for me in moving to North America — how little
variety there is in the grocery stores, and how bland the tastes.

Actually I’m overstating it — there’s _lots_ of variety in engineered food
sounds like breakfast cereals (though interestingly not in potato chip
flavors) but the fruit and veggie choices in the supermarkets are pretty
limited and boring.

~~~
tallanvor
Try moving to Norway and then tell me you think that the selection in North
America has little variety!

------
yarg
I'd be disinclined to refer to Cavendish as a cultivar, let alone a species;
they are clones, copied not bred - what sickens one will sicken them all.

~~~
maxerickson
What makes a cultivar though?

(the clones obviously belong to some species)

On one side, the consistent fruit makes a cultivar. What's the other side?

~~~
foxhop
My understanding is how they reproduce. A cultivar reproduces "sexually", and
is "true to seed". If you plant the seed you get the same or very similar
plant (which produces the same seeds).

To clone is to trick an organism to divide into two or more organisms. This
means they have the same strengths and weaknesses because they have nearly the
same genes.

Cloning can be done by rooting cuttings of a plant or attaching a cutting of a
desirable plant to a root stock of a less desirable version (or a version with
qualities like limited height to keep the tree small)

~~~
maxerickson
Bananas self clone, growing horizontal roots that turn into whole banana
plants. So they do propagate themselves.

~~~
foxhop
Apparently bananas as we know them are a mostly sterile hybrid of two other
trees.

They self propagate like you say (but humans also spread them around). Bananas
have a near zero rate of sexual reproduction, if you can get one to produce a
seed, it's viability is low.

If you can get the seed to germinate, the resulting "offspring" from that will
be distinct from the original banana, a new variety. It will not necessarily
be "true to seed". It might be a better banana, or worse.

If you plant a lettuce seed you will get the same lettuce, year over year.
Same with peppers and tomatoes, etc. Their traits were bred instead of cloned.

~~~
mythrwy
While generally correct the last paragraph is a bit off.

You "might" get the same pepper, lettuce or tomato. If the parent was non-
hybrid or open pollinated.

If it's a lettuce, pepper or tomato from the grocery store almost for sure
it's a hybrid and you won't get the same plant as the parent.

------
CapitalistCartr
Past HN entries on the Cavendish:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883805)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12263727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12263727)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653220)

~~~
outsidetheparty
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425918)

------
1_player
I'll once again post this Damn Interesting article about banana varieties:
[https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-
of-...](https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-
banana/)

------
kwindla
The Flexport folks published a blog post last year on the coming banana
apocalypse: [https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the-
banana/](https://www.flexport.com/blog/supply-chain-of-the-banana/)

It's really worth reading. (There's lots of great stuff on the Flexport blog.)

------
nabeards
I'll be watching this closely as a precursor of more damage to come. If the
fungus is able to make it from Southeast Asia to the Americas, then the rubber
plants in Southeast Asia may soon fall to the South American leaf blight. That
would cause the complete destruction of the global natural rubber market.

Excellent additional reading in Growing American Rubber by Mark R. Finlay.

~~~
inferiorhuman
Also, Fordlandia.

------
endymi0n
All ethical thoughts aside for a moment (most of this article actually made me
sad), is there any remaining strain of the Gros Michel?

Seems to me from the articles’ tone like the Cavendish was more of an inferior
stopgap solution. If we start genetic fixing bananas, doesn‘t it make sense to
start on the „better model“?

~~~
adrianmonk
I think that's a great idea, but economically all the investment right now is
probably in saving the Cavendish banana. Not only is that what modern
customers are familiar with but it's also what the industry is set up to
produce.

However, it that succeeds, perhaps it will inspire people to duplicate the
feat with the Big Mike / Gros Michel. And inspire investment to back that,
both for profit potential from a "new" product and for insurance in case some
new problem befalls the Cavendish.

But I'd bet investors don't want to divide their efforts right now.

------
scythe
This Fusarium situation almost seems like timing an economic collapse. I'm not
exaggerating when I say I've been reading articles about the coming
bananapocalypse since grade school. So maybe we _should_ be convinced it's
going to happen, but when? Next year? Next decade? 2045?

------
Karupan
As an aside, I don’t really like the most common banana available in
Australia. Growing up in the southern part of India, I distinctly remember 7
varieties which I haven’t seen elsewhere. If the death of the most common
banana means others may become more commonly available, I’m all for it.

~~~
knowThySelfx
I don't think people there care for Cavendish much anyway ;) It isn't
considered at par with other varieties.

------
huac
Is there anywhere that one can get the Gros Michel? I vaguely remember the
bananas I ate in Asia tasting different.

~~~
amyjess
IIRC, they're still produced in Thailand, so depending on the part of Asia you
were in, you may have already had it.

~~~
mattparlane
Correct, I'm living in Thailand currently and the local bananas all look very
much like Gros Michels. They taste great to me and are super cheap, very good
joules per money.

------
cageface
_Though Southeast Asia, where bananas originated, grows dozens of varieties of
banana, the Cavendish is the only kind deemed acceptable for export._

This is a pity because a lot of the bananas you see here in SE Asia are more
flavorful than the Cavendish anyway. Industrial agriculture's need to produce
identical, identifiable, marketable products year after year is responsible
for some very destructive and fragile monocultures.

~~~
knowThySelfx
Yes indeed, a pity. The "export worthy" Cavendish is not considered worthy in
local markets though.

~~~
cageface
It's kind of the Red Delicious of bananas. Somebody just needs to educate
consumers about the alternatives.

------
tw1010
The fact that this was a story, then stopped being a story, and is now a thing
again, with no interaction on my end, makes me sleep much better at night.
Stop caring about the variables you can't control, and you'll live a better
life. There were even people who prospered when world war II happened. Bernard
Russell said that WWII was one of the best times of his life, personally.

------
natecavanaugh
I also wonder, if in addition to looking at genetically modifying the banana
to be resistant, what about modifying the fungus so that a strain is symbiotic
with the banana and instead of killing it's host, it was able to keep going
because the host isn't killed?

That's all very hand wavy, but I was thinking, might not another alternative
be modifying the enemy (bacteria or virus) so that there is a selective weight
to a more beneficial alternate bacteria? Of course, any part of humans trying
to manage the food supply, or nature in general, will have unintended
downstream consequences, but I wonder if there are some other ways to approach
the problem.

Also, of commercial bananas don't replicate via seeds, why do they have seeds
at all?

------
djsumdog
I remember when I was in Australia a few years back, a friend told me the
government was running an entire campaign to destroy banana plans because they
got this thing that led to spots on the banana. But my friend said it didn't
hurt the plant or reduce the lifespan of the banana.

But the government started slashing people's plants on their own property to
eradicate it. The whole thing was funded by banana farms and forced people to
buy from farms rather than grown their own.

I don't think that's what the article is referring to, but do any Australians
here remember that campaign? What was that specific disease?

------
wbillingsley
[https://abgc.org.au/2015/05/21/what-assistance-is-
resistance...](https://abgc.org.au/2015/05/21/what-assistance-is-resistance/)

It seems the industry has been working on -

\- identifying "tolerant" varieties of Cavendish (there's more than one)

\- a GM fusarium-resistant Cavendish

\- management regimes for growing fusarium-tolerant crops in infested soil

Looks like bananas won't be disappearing but could be becoming more expensive
for a while.

------
dimecyborg
The article seems to promote lab grown method of planting over shoot from
parent based method. Ideally the shoot from plants would be much better
because if one plantation gets affected it might not affect the other
plantations as they are not shared and there is a vast distribution of the
same variety.

------
vkjv
The changes in bananas over time are pretty fascinating.

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

------
swsieber
Would it be possible to grow bananas locally from the seed tip (provided you
have a controlled growing environment)?

Also, seeing as these are clones.... Is there any way to _breed_ this species
of banana for more variety.

~~~
marcosdumay
Some varieties of banana do rarely breed. IFAIK, cavendish doesn't.

I just don't get why people want to import only that variety. It's not great
any any way besides being easy to package. Transportation is quite fast
nowadays, it shouldn't be that big a problem.

~~~
maxerickson
It's not people, it's "the system".

Faster transportation costs more and they have to be shipped before they are
ripe and then triggered to ripen in time for sale. And then while they are for
sale they probably do better if they are attractive and consistent and known
by the consumer.

------
21
It seems like there is a single exact fungus which is causing the trouble.

Can someone explain why it is not possible to create some sort of targeted
fungus killer, maybe using something like CRISPR?

~~~
mathw
Possibly because...

1) It's really hard and we just don't know how yet

2) Creating an engineered biological weapon and releasing it into the
environment just might have some unintended consequences when it starts
interacting with all the things out there which could cause it to mutate

I doubt our understanding of biology is strong enough to be sure that we could
do something like that without causing major problems. It would, possibly, be
more viable to construct an altered version of the fungus itself which could
outcompete the one that kills the bananas, which is the kind of approach that
has been investigated for controlling other pests such as mosquitos (although
in that case they engineer mosquitos which produce sterile female offspring
but viable males, so the males keep breeding and producing more sterile
females... eventually you run out of fertile females and tada! No more
mosquitos).

------
jhiska
This story again? This is bananas!

------
MechEStudent
I see these at a cadence that works with price engineering. I don't believe
it. I think it is like "ham supply is constrained this easter" and then they
mark up the prices and there are the same number of hams. They were
engineering the market, not presenting an actual problem.

This looks like that.

~~~
nkozyra
Skepticism is a great trait, but it should be your catalyst, not your
conclusion. The article(s) showing this have numbers that support the claim,
not to mention the history of previous cultivars' demise via similar
mechanisms. Do you have something to the contrary?

~~~
DrScump

      Skepticism is a great trait, but it should be your catalyst, not your conclusion.
    

That's very well put. Can I steal it?

~~~
nkozyra
MIT license. ;)

