Beneath the Peel: The Risks of Banana Uniformity
What can we do to prevent the loss of this fruity staple?
Dear Telltale readers,
I found out something that brought a smile to my face this week. Earlier this month, the World Banana Forum was held in Rome. Considering the enormous amounts of money involved in the banana trade (worldwide, almost 20 million tonnes of bananas were exported in 2023), the fact that there even is something such as the World Banana Forum shouldn’t have been surprising to me, but it was, and it made me happy. Something about the idea of a forum aimed at discussing something as seemingly silly as bananas just is an amusing idea to me.
However, upon further reading of this article by the Guardian, I found out discussing the future of bananas isn’t as silly as I initially assumed. You see, the well-known and well-loved banana we pick up at supermarkets across the globe is the Cavendish banana. Whereas wild bananas grow from seed, a banana plant from the Cavendish variety can be propegated solely from clones. Once a plant has flowered and borne fruit, it dies, and little ones sprout from the previous stem’s base. This means they don’t evolve to adapt themselves to changing circumstances, which becomes especially problematic when a disease arises. Which is exactly what happened.
Banana history
Here’s a little bit of banana history: before the Cavendish, the Gros Michel variety dominated the banana market. However, this variety was all but wiped out in the 50’s and 60’s by a fungus that caused the Panama disease. Luckily was there the Cavendish, which was a convenient choice for a couple of reasons: it has a long shelf life, they are efficient considering land-use, and they are resistant to some of the major banana-diseases. That is, until the variety became infected by another strain of the Panama disease known as Tropical Race (TR) 4 in the 1990’s.
After the Gros Michel’s demise, most Cavendish plantations were run in exactly the same way: the plants were planted as close together as possible, and nothing but those same banana plants was grown there. This, of course, enabled the fungus to travel easily from plant to plant. The interpretation was that the problem must lie with the variety, rather than with the practice of monocropping.
Less profitable varieties
There are, however, over a thousand different types of bananas, including red bananas, blue bananas, and small sweet bananas called elephant toes. And it just so happens that those different types can be grown together as well: Nishanth K, a banana farmer in Kerala, has over 250 varieties of banana on his farm. The problem is that these varieties usually don’t have as long of a shelf life as the Cavendish, making them harder to ship from where they’re grown - tropical climates - to where they’re consumed - mostly, the US and Europe. This is one of the reasons that makes these different types of bananas much less profitable to grow, leading farmers to opt mostly for the Cavendish.
The beloved Cavendish banana is threatened with extinction. Even if another variety is found that could replace it, simply carrying on in the same way is not a solution, but merely a temporary fix. What, then, can be done to ensure the survival of the banana as a staple food in European and American kitchens?
From mono to poly
One solution could be to switch from monoculture to polyculture: switching from growing large numbers of one crop on one farm to multiple different types of crops growing interspersed with each other. This type of cultivation protects the crops much better against pests and diseases, and has the added benefit that the crops can exchange nutrients with each other, making for healthier crops and less need for (chemical) fertilizer. Bananas could be grown together with papayas or plantains for example, which already happens on some plantations.
Growing different crops together instead of focusing on just one crop could actually lead to a higher yield. For example, growing corn, beans, and squash separately would take nearly twice as much land than growing them together. So even though it would be quite a switch for traditional agriculture to go from monoculture to polyculture, it could eventually be much more profitable - which in turn could potentially make up for the less profitable banana varieties. But what do you think?
In what way can we ensure the survival of crops like the banana for future generations?
Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear what you think!