Rome – The world cannot get enough of bananas, the most exported fruit and one of the top five staple crops in developing countries. But global culinary habits may be in for a shock, with the banana as it is known in the West under threat by an epidemic.
The Cavendish variety, which accounts for half of global banana production and 99 per cent of what is consumed in developed countries, is threatened by Tropical Race 4 (TR4), a strain of the Fusarium wilt disease.
“The global concern of TR4 is that so far there are no effective eradication solutions,” and once it contaminates a plantation, “it can remain viable in the soil for decades,” the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) wrote in a July paper.
TR4 was discovered in south-east Asia in the 1990s, and since then it has spread to Africa and parts of the Middle East. If it were to affect India, the world’s biggest banana producer, or Ecuador, the world’s largest exporter, its impact could be devastating.
Experts say the problem is exacerbated by the banana industry’s over-reliance on the Cavendish, a legacy of the 1960s Green Revolution, which massively boosted agricultural output through the use of chemical fertilizers and mechanization.
Banana production has more than quadrupled in the last five decades, jumping from 22 million tonnes in 1961 to over 107 million tonnes in 2013, the most recent year included in FAO statistics. “For mechanization to work, you need standardization,” explains Dr Chikelu Mba, a Nigerian plant geneticist from FAO.
“If you need to send a combined harvester into your wheat field, you want plants that grow to the same height, mature on the same day, and so on. This uniformity imperils our food system, because a single disease can wipe out everything,” Mba tells dpa.
“In a sense, our success has become our nightmare,” he adds. Bioversity International, a research institute on biodiversity and food security, estimates that out of 30,000 edible plant species, just four – wheat, maize, rice and soybean – currently account for 50 per cent of global agricultural area.
In a recent presentation, its senior scientist, Stefano Padulosi, quoted a 1983 US study by the Rural Advancement Foundation International, showing that 93 per cent of seed varieties that were available in 1903 have been lost. “We have several historical examples of why genetic diversity in plants is important. Think of when you put your savings in a bank: the financial consultant will always advise you to diversify your investments,” Padulosi tells dpa.
He cites Ireland’s Potato Famine of the 19th century, which caused an estimated 1 million deaths, as a lesson from the past: The country’s potato production was ravaged by disease partly because it was overwhelmingly based on a single variety.
For bananas, more than 1,500 varieties have been documented. It is unlikely that any one of them could serve as a straight replacement for the Cavendish, but they could help develop a TR4-resistant variety through regular plant breeding or genetic engineering.
The Cavendish itself was adopted as the mainstream banana product in the 1960s, after a previous dominant variety, the Gros Michel, was wiped out by an older type of Fusarium wilt disease. Consumers lost out in the process, as the Gros Michel apparently tasted much better.
In potential disaster, Dr Mba sees an opportunity. “The banana we consume and love is under threat, but rather than that being a cause for despair, it should be an incentive for us to exercise our intellect” and “breed new varieties that are tolerant to this disease,” he says, adding that they may even be “more nutritious.”
Edie Mukiibi, an Ugandan agronomist who is vice president of Slow Food International, an Italy-born global movement that defends local gastronomical traditions and sustainable farming, advocates more old-school responses. He tells dpa that small-scale farmers in his country have kept the wilt disease “at bay” with traditional quarantine methods, and that the Cavendish monoculture should in any case be replaced by more varied banana consumption.
“The people who eat bananas deserve better than what is currently in European or American shelves,” he says, calling on rich world consumers to explore small-scale, non-commercial varieties from around the world. Echoing the biblical Noah’s Arc, Slow Food has created an online catalogue of little-known or nearly extinct food products called the Ark of Taste. It includes almost 4,000 entries from across the globe, and a further 1,600 have been nominated for future listing.
“If people don’t want foods to disappear, they should stop being just consumers and become co-producers: this means getting involved in food production, starting from responsible choices like buying seasonal, local and less commercial varieties,” Mukiibi says.
-dpa
