Please don't take my bananas!

In Fred Pierce's Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff, he has a chapter on the banana, and how the variety of banana that we eat (the Cavendish) is in danger of being wiped out due to disease. For some reason, this chapter fascinated me. I guess because bananas seem like such a simple thing, and Man can do anything, right? Surely we should be able to save the banana. But this is a humbling reminder that Nature is a force that can continue to elude us, even with something as seemingly simple as the banana.

Anyway, I was intrigued and I needed to know more about this banana situation, so I checked out Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel. I suppose this book is really more than I ever wanted to know about bananas, but it is interesting. For instance, I didn't know that the Cavendish banana is not the only variety of banana out there. Apparently there are hundreds of different varieties of banana throughout the world, ranging in size from a pinky finger to a large mango, with skin colors ranging from green to crimson and purple and flesh ranging from white to orange. Also, did you know that it is actually a sterile banana plant that produces the fruit that we eat? And obviously, a sterile plant can't reproduce, so in order to grow bananas, cuttings have to be taken from the sterile plant and grown. In nature, organisms evolve over time to become stronger, more resistant and less susceptible to disease, etc. But because bananas come from sterile plants that do not reproduce, they have not had the opportunity to evolve and are a very fragile plant, easily susceptible to disease. The Cavendish banana is currently under threat from disease. This has happened once before. Before the Cavendish, the Gros Michel was the popular variety of banana that most people ate, but it succumbed to disease and was wiped out by the 1950s. Banana scientists are trying to come up with an alternative, in case the worst should happen. But creating a new variety of banana that is more resistant to disease and that people will enjoy, is very difficult. Banana's are a "plant breeder's nightmare." Because bananas come from a sterile plant, this means there are no seeds they can use for breeding. Every once in a while, some seeds will be found in a plant, but this is rare, and even then the success rate for producing an edible banana is low. I certainly hope they are able to find a solution. The future of millions of breakfasts hang in the balance here.

And now I will leave you with more fascinating banana facts:
In 2007 Chiquita was fined $25 million in by the U.S. Department of Justice for payments made to an acknowledged "terrorist organization" in Columbia.

Dole was sued in 2007 in U.S. courts for using chemicals that render workers sterile.

In 1999, U.S. banana consumption is 100 bananas per person per year.