My wife and I were discussing Bananas today at lunch, starting with this little tidbit I found on Yahoo's 9:
Then she wondered where the song "Yes, We have no Bananas" came from. Since we are slow at work; I did some googling and while searching came across this disturbing article from
Can This Fruit Be Saved?
Dan Koeppel
“A Banana,” says Juan Fernando Aguilar, “is
not just a banana.” The bearded botanist and I are traipsing through one of the
world’s most unusual banana plantations, moving down row after row of towering
plants and ducking into the shade of broad leaves in an attempt to avoid the
Central American midday heat. In an area about the size of a U.S. shopping mall,
Aguilar, 46, is growing more than 300 banana varieties. Most commercial growing
facilities handle just a single banana type—the one we Americans slice into our
morning cereal.
The diversity of fruit in Aguilar’s field is astonishing.
Some of the bananas are thick and over a foot long; others are slender and
pinky-size. Some are meant to be eaten raw and sweet and some function more like
potatoes, meant for boiling and baking or frying into snack chips. But Aguilar’s
admonition is aimed squarely at our northern lunch boxes and breakfast tables.
For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana:
yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless. Our banana,
called the Cavendish, is one variety Aguilar doesn’t grow here. “And for you,”
says the chief banana breeder for the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural
Investigation (FHIA), “the Cavendish is the banana.”
The Cavendish—as the
slogan of Chiquita, the globe’s largest banana producer, declares—is “quite
possibly the world’s perfect food.” Bananas are nutritious and convenient;
they’re cheap and consistently available. Americans eat more bananas than any
other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per
person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds). It also turns out that the
100 billion Cavendish bananas consumed annually worldwide are perfect from a
genetic standpoint, every single one a duplicate of every other. It doesn’t
matter if it comes from Honduras or Thailand, Jamaica or the Canary Islands—each
Cavendish is an identical twin to one first found in Southeast Asia, brought to
a Caribbean botanic garden in the early part of the 20th century, and put into
commercial production about 50 years ago.
That sameness is the banana’s
paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect,
lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one
banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation
could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving
supermarket shelves empty.
A wild scenario? Not when you consider that
there’s already been one banana apocalypse. Until the early 1960s, American
cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana
that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like
the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the
sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early
part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big
Mike harvest. The malady, which attacks the leaves, is in the same category as
Dutch Elm disease. It appeared first in Suriname, then plowed through the Car-
ibbean, finally reaching Honduras in the 1920s. (The country was then the
world’s largest banana producer; today it ranks third, behind Ecuador and Costa
Rica.)
Growers adopted a frenzied strategy of shifting crops to unused land,
maintaining the supply of bananas to the public but at great financial and
environmental expense—the tactic destroyed millions of acres of rainforest. By
1960, the major importers were nearly bankrupt, and the future of the fruit was
in jeopardy. (Some of the shortages during that time entered the fabric of
popular culture; the 1923 musical hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas” is said to have
been written after songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn were denied in an
attempt to purchase their favorite fruit by a syntactically colorful,
out-of-stock neighborhood grocer.) U.S. banana executives were hesitant to
recognize the crisis facing the Gros Michel, according to John Soluri, a history
professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of Banana Cultures, an
upcoming book on the fruit. “Many of them waited until the last minute.”
Once
a little-known species, the Cavendish was eventually accepted as Big Mike’s
replacement after billions of dollars in infrastructure changes were made to
accommodate different growing and ripening needs. Its advantage was its
resistance to Panama disease. But in 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that
can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race
4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it
is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia. It has yet to hit Africa or
Latin America, but most experts agree that it is coming. “Given today’s modes of
travel, there’s almost no doubt that it will hit the major Cavendish crops,”
says Randy Ploetz, the University of Florida plant pathologist who identified
the first Sumatran samples of the fungus.
A global effort is now under way to
save the fruit—an effort defined by two opposing visions of how best to address
the looming crisis. On one side are traditional banana growers, like Aguilar,
who raise experimental breeds in the fields, trying to create a replacement
plant that looks and tastes so similar to the Cavendish that consumers won’t
notice the difference. On the other side are bioengineers like Rony Swennen,
who, armed with a largely decoded banana genome, are manipulating the plant’s
chromosomes, sometimes crossing them with DNA from other species, with the goal
of inventing a tougher Cavendish that will resist Panama disease and other
ailments.
Banana experts disagree on when the Latin American and African
crops will be hit by the Panama fungus. Ploetz won’t venture a guess, but he
notes that the Malaysian plantations went from full-scale commercial operations
to “total wipeout” in less than five years. Currently, there is no way to
effectively combat Panama disease and no Cavendish replacement in sight. And so
traditional scientists and geneticists are in a race—against one another, for
certain, but mostly against time.Honduras is in many ways the epicenter of the
American super- market banana. More than a century ago, a pair of U.S.
companies—United Fruit and Standard Fruit, now known, respectively, as Chiquita
and Dole—built some of the world’s first commercial banana plantations in the
Central American nation. Technological infrastructure was the first task: The
banana producers began as railroad companies, with friendly local governments
granting thousands of acres of surrounding rainforest for each mile of track
laid. Although bananas had been sporadically available in the U.S. since
colonial days, the post–Civil War advent of motorized transit by rail and
steamship made the importation of tropical fruit practical. (An 1896 article in
this magazine entitled “Where Bananas Grow” observed that the U.S. market for
bananas had increased more than 40-fold in the previous quarter century, owing
mostly to improved “facilities for transporting and preserving them.”)
By the
early 1900s, bananas surpassed apples as the nation’s favorite fruit, becoming
so popular that in the days before municipal trash collection, the slapstick
slip on a discarded peel was a genuine hazard. (Luckily, Boy Scouts were on the
case: “A good turn may consist in removing a piece of banana peel from the
pavement,” their 1914 handbook advised.) The problem of banana litter helped
lead to the development of the earliest urban refuse-removal networks, according
to Virginia Scott Jenkins, author of Bananas: An American History.
Bananas
have always been a technology incubator. Because they’re a time-sensitive
product—they need to be harvested green, then delivered to market just at
ripening time—systems had to be developed to bring precision to the picking and
shipping processes. Leonel Castillo, a banana-production consultant who grew up
in Chiquita’s corporate compound near the city of San Pedro Sula, on Honduras’s
northern coast, explains that the old way was “to wait until you could see the
ship coming over the horizon toward port.” Then banana workers would engage in
frantic nonstop harvesting and rush the crop to the boats. Chiquita engineers
developed the first radio networks in the tropics as a way to bypass this
antiquated system. The fruit’s popularity also led to the development of
ripening rooms whose controlled environment can slow or speed the way picked
fruit ages; refrigerated steamships; and early precursors to bar-coding that
allowed each bunch to be tracked by field, plantation, originating country and
shipping container.
But the main thrust of banana tech has always been the
search for new varieties. FHIA now occupies the buildings at Chiquita’s old
Honduran headquarters that since the 1920s have been the global hub for
traditional banana breeding (the buildings also hint at the lifestyle once
provided for executives at tropical outposts, spreading across a campus-like
compound that once housed a swimming pool and horse-racing track).
Chiquita
abandoned most tropical research in the 1970s; FHIA opened in 1986 as part of an
initiative to promote local economic development. One of the first new breeds to
come out of the effort, which is funded by a combination of government and
private grants, was the “Goldfinger” banana, also known as FHIA-01. The
Goldfinger was developed by painstakingly cross-breeding samples from the more
than 350 banana types originally collected by United Fruit scientists. It is a
highly versatile fruit, suitable for cooking and eating; it has a slightly tart,
apple-like flavor and is one of the few bred bananas to gain significant
consumer acceptance.
The Goldfinger was created by Philip Rowe, a legendary
advocate for trad- itional methods of banana breeding; Rowe died in 2002, and
the program was taken over by Aguilar. Like Rowe, Aguilar believes that
conventional hybridization—not genetic engineering—is the best way to devise a
Cavendish replacement. The Goldfinger was evidence of that belief: It
transported well and caught on in certain markets, notably Australia. But it
didn’t taste like the sweeter Caven- dish and never took hold in the
Americas.Aguilar moves quickly through the fields surrounding the old Chiquita
headquarters, chain-smoking Marlboros between taking bites of sample fruit. He
understands that to actually find the needle he’s looking for in his vast yellow
haystack, he’s got to maintain a fast pace. But he also knows that agricultural
husbandry is a slow process. It requires patience. To balance both, he says, it
is necessary to see the job as something more than just ordinary science. The
race to save the banana is personal. “The bananas,” he says, “are my
children.”
Each of Aguilar’s experimental varieties are tagged and set off in
rows. To put the new bananas to the test, no fungicides are used here, so it
isn’t difficult to see the difference between healthy, resistant plants and
afflicted ones. The strong plants have expansive green leaves. Both Panama
disease and another malady, Black Sigatoka (which unlike Panama disease is
present in Central America), cause leaves to wilt and crumble, leaving the fruit
unprotected from the sun and reducing photosynthesis—the dying plant can’t make
sugar, and fruit yield is severely diminished. Sigatoka is a major problem, but,
unlike Panama disease, it is controllable with chemical sprayings.
Bananas
grow from an underground root structure; what juts out of the ground is more
like a stem than a trunk. A long spike, covered in tiny flowers, emerges from
the stem. The female flowers grow into fruit at the base of the flower-bearing
stalk, while the male flower—bulbous and red—grows at the very tip of the stalk,
weighing it down, curving toward the ground. The fruits grow in spiraling groups
called “hands” (they’re the bundles you buy in the store; an individual banana
is called a “finger”). A banana plant can have up to a dozen attached hands;
together, a plant’s entire output is called a “bunch.”
Bananas are different
from most other cultivated plants in that almost all the varieties—including the
Cavendish—lack seeds (that round, dark center in a banana slice is the vestige
of what was once the fruit’s reproductive core). Cultivated bananas never
reproduce sexually on their own. Rather, new stems grow from the existing root,
sometimes for many years. Forcing the pollen from one male flower to make its
way to the female of another plant, however, is how traditional banana breeders
like Aguilar’s team develop new varieties. Most mornings, usually just as dawn
is breaking, a team of hand pollinators pedal through FHIA’s dirt-tracked fields
on battered three-speed bicycles. They move from plant to plant, gathering the
powdery pollen from the males and transferring it to receptive female flowers,
keeping meticulous records of their activities (Aguilar calls the field “a giant
spreadsheet”). The goal of all this is to get seeds, and to use them to grow
Aguilar’s experimental varieties, one of which, he hopes, will ultimately yield
a tasty, market-friendly Cavendish replacement. What are the odds of an
individual seed ultimately yielding a thriving hybrid? “About 1 in 10,000,”
Aguilar says.
It takes about four months for a pollinated plant to bear
fruit, which is harvested and brought to a processing shed for seed extraction.
Workers press thousands of bananas through mesh strainers. About one seed is
found for every 300 bananas. The seeds are then brought indoors, to what Aguilar
calls the “embryo rescue unit.” Of the tiny number of seeds, only a third of
them actually germinate. As the plants grow, they move from test tubes through a
series of protected greenhouses and finally back to the fields. The first fruits
are harvested two years after the initial pollination. “That’s when we begin to
get a sense of what we got,” Aguilar says.The difference between a near-natural
banana and an FHIA hybrid can be significant. Aguilar shows me a series of
photos dating back to 1959. The fruit yielded by Phil Rowe’s earliest
experiments in cross-breeding are very small. The descendants of those initial
plants—the most recent is called FHIA-26—are massive and hardy.
Looking good
is important for a consumer-friendly banana (Chiquita used to publish color
charts that were hung in supermarkets, all designed to guide shoppers to the
most yellow bananas). But taste is equally critical. As Aguilar leads me through
the fields, we pass row after well-delineated row of exotic bananas. He stops at
a group of plants marked “Umpiko,” pulls a fruit off the stem, and peels it,
taking a quick taste before handing a chunk to me. It’s quite good—maybe
milder-tasting than typical bananas—but the big problem with the Umpiko is that
it ripens too fast. It would never make it to U.S. stores in time. A few rows
down, we duck into the shade of a low-slung plant. Height, too, is key; the Gros
Michel was so tall that it was susceptible to wind blow-down. The Cavendish is
considerably lower and, therefore, hardier in bad weather, although in 1998
nearly the entire Honduran banana crop was still wiped out by Hurricane Mitch.
Aguilar picks and tastes another banana.
None of our snacks are Cavendish, or
descended from Cavendish—and none taste much like the banana I’m used to. Just
as importers were afraid that consumers would reject today’s most popular banana
when it replaced the Big Mike, they worry that a fruit that isn’t creamy and
sweet, like the Cavendish, will destroy markets. “We can make bananas that could
be equal,” Aguilar says, “but not the same.”Far from the steamy bananalands of
the Caribbean, an entirely different effort to create the banana of the future
nearly fills a basketball-court-size greenhouse 20 minutes east of Brussels,
Belgium. Rony Swennen is director of the Laboratory of Tropical Crop Improvement
at the Catholic University of Leuven. He oversees the world’s largest collection
of bananas and plantains. More than 1,200 varieties are kept in rows of test
tubes, tiny plantlets encased in glass—each a potential donor of genetic
material to be used in engineering new banana varieties. For the past decade,
Swennen and his colleagues have been decoding and manipulating banana genes in
the hopes of building resistance to the main afflictions that strike the fruit’s
commercial varieties: Black Sigatoka; nematodes, a kind of minuscule worm; and
the various strains of Panama disease.
Banana-bereft suburban breakfast
tables notwithstanding, Swennen says that the real danger the spread of these
path- ogens poses is in the developing world, especially East Africa. In the
densely populated countries around Lake Victoria—Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania,
Burundi and Rwanda—bananas are primary nutrition, accounting for near-total
carbohydrate consumption in some diets (in Uganda, the word for food, “matooke,”
translates from Swahili as “banana”). The bananas eaten in East Africa are not
the dessert-style fruit consumed in the West; they are far more versatile
(there’s even a beer brewed from bananas sold in Kampala). But like the
Cavendish, African bananas are threatened. The Ugandan National Banana Research
Program says that plants that once yielded fruit over a 50-year life span are
now so much less resistant to disease that they become unproductive and require
replacement after as few as five years. Bananas are also essential to the
region’s other crops: They provide cover for tropical forests, allowing staples
such as beans and sweet potatoes to grow in their shade. Without bananas,
Swennen says, 20 million people would face “massive destabilization.”
The
reason bananas are so susceptible to disease has to do with their ancient
origins. Almost no plant has been cultivated longer by humans. The earliest
banana production began in Southeast Asia, but of the hundreds of varieties
found in that region, only about 10 or 15, according to Swennen, were brought to
Africa. (Bananas are a perfect crop for subsistence farming, since once a family
has a healthy plant, no more seeds need to be planted—or bought; instead farmers
simply replant shoots, called “suckers,” from existing trees.) Bananas mutate
easily, and of the few Asian banana varieties that originally made it to Africa,
more than 200 new varieties have emerged. But these varieties remain genetically
similar, so they’re prone to parallel afflictions. The situation in Latin
America is even worse. “Only a few moved from Africa to there,” Swennen says,
“so you’ve got even lower variability.”
The geneticist has already created
one sweet banana that, using genetic material from radishes, has built-in
resistance to Black Sigatoka. The lab is also developing high-yield plantains
for Africa and a banana manipulated to be high in beta-carotene. Swennen
emphasizes that biotech is literally the only way to save the Cavendish, which,
because it is 100 percent seedless, can’t be improved on by traditional
hybridization methods. And FHIA’s approach of growing a new variety from
scratch, he argues, is too slow.
Traditional banana scientists, like the ones
in Honduras, know that the methods they use are slower by decades than the
lab-induced DNA manipulation that Swennen and his fellow researchers are working
on. But they also know that resistance to genetically engineered foods runs deep
among the world’s consuming public. A recent survey by Fyffes (the banana
importer that is to Britain what Chiquita is to the U.S.) found that 82 percent
of U.K. shoppers said they would never buy a genetically altered banana, even if
proven to be safe, even if doing so allowed the elimination of pesticides and
other potentially harmful agricultural chemicals—a major advantage, supporters
say, of biotech crops. Public aversion to DNA-altered foods exists throughout
Europe, where most such fruits and vegetables are banned. Although Chiquita
wouldn’t comment for this story, company executives have repeatedly rejected
biotech techniques for use in consumer products.
“I can’t understand this
romantic idea that nature is perfect, and that what we do is create
Frankensteins,” Swennen says. People “are frightened—and they’re wrong.” He
believes that the threats bananas face mean that they are likely to be the
bioengineered food that finally forces global shoppers to consider—and
accept—science’s inevitable intervention in the agricultural process. “There’s
almost no choice,” he says. “We need resistant bananas.”The sprawling old
compound in Honduras still houses a small set of Chiquita offices, but the
company’s presence in the region is better symbolized by the oversize, fading
logo—a blown-up version of the sticker you find on your grocery-store
fruit—painted on the side of the com-pany’s now run-down country club. Chiquita
and Dole still farm thousands of acres here, but they’re more absentee landlords
than the all-powerful entities they once were. When I had dinner at the club,
Leonel Castillo told me that the dining room we were sitting in was “the place
where governments were once made—and broken.” That controversial legacy, which
led to the coining of the term “banana republic,” is one of the reasons the
major banana companies are generally unforthcoming with the media. Chiquita does
nod to the old days on its Web site, where a chronology page called “Our Complex
History” acknowledges, alongside more positive achievements, dubious acts: the
company’s participation in the 1954 overthrow of Guate- malan president Jacobo
Arbenz Guzmán; the 1961 use of its corporate steamship fleet to support the
failed Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion; antitrust lawsuits; the suicide of United
Fruit chairman Eli Black (he jumped from the 42nd story of New York’s Pan Am
building) after a 1975 bribery scandal. Banana companies remain the focus of
environmental and labor activism, although both Chiquita and Dole have worked in
recent years to have their operations certified by groups such as the Rainforest
Alliance.
There’s no doubt that workers at banana plantations are better
treated than they were in the 1950s, when Honduran author Ramón Amaya Amador
published an allegorical novel called Green Prison, but some critics say the
industry has a long way to go. The biggest problem, says Alistair Smith,
coordinator of BananaLink, a British activist organization, is the continued use
of pesticides, which have huge “negative human and environmental impact.” His
group cites instance after instance of long-term ill health effects in
workers.
The pesticide issue is a big one for banana researchers as well. It
isn’t so much for banana consumers, at least directly, since most of the
substances used on the plants don’t make it into the flesh of the thick-skinned
fruit. But the human and monetary cost of spraying grows higher as more
chemicals are needed to battle increasingly virulent diseases. “In the 1970s we
controlled Black Sigatoka by spraying 10 to 12 times a year,” says FHIA director
Adolfo Martínez, an agricultural economist. That frequency has jumped to almost
weekly, at a cost of up to $1,000 per acre for every spraying. “There will come
a point at which that is neither environmentally nor economically sustainable,”
Martínez says. Despite concerns over pesticides, the position of the fruit
companies has been to combat disease with chemicals. David McLaughlin,
Chiquita’s senior director for environmental affairs, told the Boston Globe in
2003 that programs like FHIA’s “cost us a lot of money for very little result.
We concentrate on research into fungicides now.”
The increasing possibility
of problems with the Cavendish has led to a change in that position. During a
2004 conference call with shareholders, Chiquita president Fernando Aguirre said
that FHIA would be “providing Chiquita with an R&D department that is
working on several varieties of bananas with different sizes and tastes. They
are also working on better resistance to plant diseases.”
How much time is
left for the Cavendish? Some scientists say five years; some say 10. Others hold
out hope that it will be much longer. Aguilar has his own particular worst-case
scenario, his own nightmare. “What happens,” he says, with a very intent look,
“is that Pan-ama disease comes before we have a good replacement. What happens
then,” he says, nearly shuddering in the shade of a towering banana plant, “is
that people change. To apples.”
