Title: A deadly fungus is threatening the future of bananas in Asia — and could spread around the world Source:
PRI (Public Radio International) URL Source:http://libertysflame.com/cgi-bin/postarticle.cgi Published:Dec 11, 2015 Author:David Leveille Post Date:2015-12-11 11:10:14 by Willie Green Keywords:None Views:2508 Comments:14
Could the plant fungus called the Panama disease spell doom for the banana as we know it?
“Thousands of varieties of bananas are grown throughout the world, but only one makes it to store shelves. It’s a banana known as the Cavendish,” says Simran Sethi. She's author of Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love. The Cavendish is ubiquitous — the yellow, not-too-sweet, popular banana.
But the Cavendish is, in a sense, a marked man. It's facing extinction. That’s according to scientists in the Netherlands who have been studying the deadly plant fungus called the Panama disease that’s already destroying banana crops in Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia. But experts warn that it’s only a matter of time before this pernicious plant disease reaches Latin America, where the majority of the world’s exported bananas come from.
What’s interesting, Sethi explains, is that this is not the first time a variety of banana has been wiped out. “The Cavendish is the replacement banana for the one banana that used to be on store shelves, which was the Gros Michel back in the 1960s.”
Back then, it was a soil fungus that destroyed the Gros Michel and now a variant of that plant disease is threatening the Cavendish. “Here it is again,” says Sethi. “Tropical Race 4, which is a strain of the exact same fungus, is now wiping out the Cavendish. The challenge is we don’t really have another banana in its place that’s ready to go to offer instead.”
Scientists in the Netherlands report that Tropical Race 4, a variant of the Panama disease, is already destroying banana crops in Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia. That may seem far away, especially if the bananas you buy come from Ecuador. But they warn that it’s “only a matter of time” before the pernicious plant disease reaches Latin America, where the majority of the world’s exported bananas come from.
The economic impact of this plant fungus is potentially huge. Cavendish bananas represent nearly one half of global banana production and exports. “It's remarkable what is happening now to the entire industry, and 15 percent of bananas throughout the world are exported," Sethi said. "In places like Ecuador, bananas are one of the top exports. We’re talking about something that is going to cripple economies.”
And as it turns out, the banana is not the only endangered food. “We’re not only seeing this with the banana, but we're seeing this with multiple foods. Slowly, slowly, slowly — they haven't yet reached our store shelves here in the United States, but the producing countries are really starting to suffer.”
One reason the Cavendish is endangered is that it’s a monoculture crop. This one variety is grown all over the world, and that makes the crop more vulnerable to disease, says Sethi. “Increasingly, most of our food is grown in monoculture as mono-crops. It's an efficient way to be able to irrigate everything at the same time, treat everything at the same time. But what you should understand is that if one disease comes in, or one pest comes in, it wipes out everything.”
Sethi says it’s a familiar story. “It’s happening now with coffee, we saw this happen with the Irish potato famine," she says. "Slowly, all these crops that are being grown in monoculture throughout the world are starting to suffer from various types of changes that were in some cases unanticipated and certainly ones that are wreaking more havoc than we would have expected had we grown crops' bio-diversely, grown multiple crops together.”
Meanwhile, agricultural scientists and plant geneticists are working around the clock to develop a new type of banana to replace the Cavendish. But it’s a race against time. So far, the fungus appears to be impervious to treatment. Researchers have documented the fungus has spread to Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Mozambique and Queensland, Australia.
So how soon will our beloved Cavendish bananas disappear from the shelves?
“That’s a really good question and I wish I could answer it. But it's the same kind of variability that we see with climate change," Sethi says. "We don't exactly know what will happen but what we do know is everything that we see in the grocery store is going to start to shift. This happened with potatoes, with the Irish potato famine, this isn’t new. It’s what’s happening to coffee, two countries have declared states of emergency because of coffee leaf rust wiping out coffee plantations, and now we see it with bananas. This is something that we will continue to see happening if we don't start to take more pro-active measures as eaters, and as people who want to support conservation of diversity in foods.”
Cultivated bananas are known as pathenocarpic, which means they can form fruit without ever having been fertilised. Rather than forming seeds, bananas reproduce by forming side-shoots and suckers. This means that the gene pool of bananas never really changes over the generations. This is a major restriction to breeding possibilities: all efforts to introduce fungus resistance to Cavendish bananas through conventional breeding methods have failed.
Many banana producers hope to save Cavendish bananas with the help of genetic engineering. This technique could finally be able to provide popular Cavendish bananas with resistance to Black Sigatoka.
Last year a group of scientists announced that they would completely sequence the banana genome. They intend to focus particularly on banana varieties found in nature. Wild bananas can reproduce by seeds and are constantly confronted with fungi and other pathogens. Sequencing the genome should enable researchers to discover resistance genes that could be transferred to high-yielding, seedless varieties.
If even Australia with highly evolved plant quarantine and regulation can't keep it out there isn't much hope I have already decreased my consumption of bananas after crops were devastated by cyclones and prices rose to ridiculous levels start thinking about $10 or $20 a pound
If even Australia with highly evolved plant quarantine and regulation can't keep it out there isn't much hope I have already decreased my consumption of bananas after crops were devastated by cyclones and prices rose to ridiculous levels start thinking about $10 or $20 a pound
all the more reason for science to create GMO fungus resistant bananas .
well then ,get used to bananas with seeds where the pulp is starchy, fibrous, and bland . Don't fool yourself into believing that a seedless banana is a natural banana. Genetically it is weak . Nature says it should die off . It is the product of thousands of years of selective breeding . The genetic diversity needed to cope with environmental stresses, such as diseases and crop pests were bred out of them a long time ago. Breeders grew bananas by grafting sterile mutants onto wild stems. This process was repeated for thousands of years to produce the banana of today.
tom I just love the idea people have been breeding bananas for thousands of years when the varieties of corn we have are a relatively recent innovation. I just don't think, given current evidence, that people are that smart, but then maybe it was our chimpanzee ancestors. No just another fairy story to go with evolution
"The banana is among the world’s oldest crops. The first edible banana was unzipped around ten thousand years ago in Southeast Asia. Its very survival is a testament to the wisdom and inventiveness of our Stone Age ancestors."
"Wild-type bananas are found throughout Southeast Asia, but are mostly inedible to humans. With hard seeds studding the fruit, wild-types have little fruit that is eatable, rendering the wild-types relatively useless for their fruit. Occasionally, however, wild-type bananas produced mutant offspring, which bore seedless fruits. Seedless mutants became the ancestors of domesticated bananas when early humans specially bred the fruit through root offshoots, or “suckers,” which appear at the base of the plants. Humans reproduced bananas from the suckers “vegetatively,” that is, by separating the offshoot from the mother pseudostem, and then replanting the suckers as a separate plant. Thus, the propagation of domestic bananas formed genetically identical plants, all of the edible, seedless variety."
Tom man has found a way to eat just about everything and it doesn't have to be very palitable. The third world has found great use for banana leaves, not much of the plant is wasted
Tom man has found a way to eat just about everything and it doesn't have to be very palitable. The third world has found great use for banana leaves, not much of the plant is wasted
That is all well and good . But we weren't talking about banana leaves .We are talking about the fruit of Cavendish bananas ,the banana preferred by the vast majority of the consumers. Trust me ,since there is a demand for the fruit ,alternatives will be created if the fungus cannot be contained or eradicated ;either through hybridization or GMO.
