I’m glad the Sydney Morning Herald is promoting this story since it’s a pretty big one. The hand is writing on the wall for bananas as a global commercial crop:
The bananapocalypse is coming. That’s the likelihood that sometime in the next decade, bananas may disappear, victims of a fungal pathogen known as Panama Disease.
Panama Disease may be the cause of this disaster, but it’s also a symptom of a bigger problem afflicting global agriculture: a failure to diversify.
I’ve written about this before. The Cavendish, the variety of banana you probably see in your stores, hasn’t always been the preferred commercial cultivar. It’s actually an inferior banana. Previous to the 1950s the Gros Michel, a significantly better banana, was the banana shipped all over the world.
For a banana to be a global commercial product it’s got to ship well, have certain ripening characteristics, have an acceptable texture, and, well, taste like a banana. The Cavendish just doesn’t taste as good as the Gros Michel did.
There’s a major difference between the coming “bananapocalypse” and the last one. There is no candidate to replace the Cavendish. There are hundreds of other varieties of bananas but none have the characteristics needed to be viable as a global commercial produce. Generally, the issues are shipping and ripening.
That will present grave problems for the countries from which we import most of our bananas: Honduras, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala. We import billions of pounds of bananas from each of those countries every year and their economies are heavily dependent on banana cultivation and export. Expect unrest in Central and South America in the coming years.
Mothers. Know your bananas!