https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ld-go-extinct/

Bye, bye, bananas
By Roberto A. Ferdman December 4 at 9:06 AM

In the mid 1900s, the most popular banana in the world€”a sweet, creamy
variety called Gros Michel grown in Latin America€”all but disappeared
from the planet. At the time, it was the only banana in the world that
could be exported. But a fungus, known as Panama Disease, which first
appeared in Australia in the late 1800s, changed that after jumping
continents. The disease debilitated the plants that bore the fruit. The
damage was so great and swift that in a matter of only a few decades the
Gros Michel nearly went extinct.

Now, half a century later, a new strain of the disease is threatening
the existence of the Cavendish, the banana that replaced the Gros Michel
as the world's top banana export, representing 99 percent of the market,
along with a number of banana varieties produced and eaten locally
around the world.

And there is no known way to stop it€”or even contain it.

That's the troubling conclusion of a new study published in PLOS
Pathogens, which confirmed something many agricultural scientists have
feared to be true: that dying banana plants in various parts of the
world are suffering from the same exact thing: Tropical Race 4, a more
potent mutation of the much feared Panama Disease.

Specifically, the researchers warn that the strain, which first began
wreaking havoc in Southeast Asia some 50 years ago and has more recently
spread to other parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia,
will eventually make its way to Latin America, where the vast majority
of the world's banana exports are still grown. At this point, they say,
it's not a question of whether Tropical Race 4 will infiltrate the
mothership of global banana production; it's a matter of when.

The reason the original disease and its latest permutation are so
threatening to bananas is largely a result of the way in which we have
cultivated the fruit. While dozens of different varieties are grown
around the world, often in close proximity to one another, commercially
produced bananas are all the same (quite literally in fact, because they
are effectively clones of each other).

This helps companies like Dole and Chiquita control for consistency and
produce massive amounts of bananas on the cheap without having to deal
with imperfections (it's the reason why the fruit is so easy to find at
supermarkets everywhere). But it also makes their bananas incredibly
vulnerable to attacks from pests and disease. When you get rid of
variety entirely, you risk exposing a crop to something it can neither
cope with nor evolve to defend itself against.

The Irish Potato Blight is a perfect example of how monocultures can
backfire. In the 1800s, Irish potato farmers came to favor a single
potato variety, which backfired when a fungus-like organism entered the
country and met no natural resistance. In 1846, the country, which
depended heavily on potatoes for basic nutrition, lost most of its
potato production, which, in turn, contributed to the deaths of hundreds
of thousands of people.

The virtual extinction of the Gros Michel is an apt example, too. When
the first strain of the Panama Disease appeared in Latin America, there
was nothing to stop it. This is how Gwynn Guilford, who chronicled the
hopeless sequence in a piece last year, put it:

As whole plantations failed, United Fruit and others made the
obvious choice: they picked up and moved somewhere else in Latin America.

But the blight followed. After it wiped out plantations in Costa
Rica, Panama disease followed United Fruit to Guatemala. And then to
Nicaragua, then Colombia and then Ecuador. By 1960, 77 years after it
had appeared, Panama disease had wiped the Gros Michel out of every
export plantation on the face of the planet.

The effect was felt all around the world. Certainly in the United
States, where it inspired a song called "Yes, We Have No Bananas."

The latest strain is likely to put the risks of monoculture on display
once more. And while scientists might find or breed a better one in the
mean time, the reality is that this time around we don't have a
formidable replacement that's resistant to the new strain of Panama
Disease. Once it reaches Latin America, as it is expected to, it could
be only a matter of decades before the most popular banana on the planet
once again disappears.

The great irony is that the Cavendish, the banana currently sold at just
about every supermarket in the developed world, rose to prominence
almost exclusively because unlike its predecessor, it was resistant to
the original strain of Panama Disease. The Cavendish is less desirable,
more susceptible to other diseases, has a tendency to bruise, doesn't
ripen easily or last very long before spoiling, and is "lamentably
bland," as Mike Peed wrote in a 2011 piece for the New Yorker.

Now that it looks like the Cavendish could suffer the same fate as the
last commercially produced banana (eventually, but not tomorrow, so
there's no need to go hoarding bananas) it's becoming a little clearer
that it probably wasn't the type of banana but rather the type of
production that needed changing.