"But the GMO lightning rod distracts from the larger cautionary tale: Our reliance on monoculture to feed surging global populations is catching up with us."<p>A lot of old true-to-seed breeds of plants with diverse sets of attributes (like e.g. being more resistant to certain environmental conditions) haven't been cultivated for economic reasons and consequently have become extinct by now.<p>There are some enthusiasts trying to preserve those old breeds by running seed-banks but they have a hard time to do so even here in Europe because of corporations like Monsanto and their heavy lobbying trying to outlaw this movement.<p>Arche Noah:<p>"In the past 100 years we have lost about 75 percent of agricultural diversity worldwide."<p><a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.arche-noah.at%2Fsortenerhaltung%2Fwozu-vielfalt&edit-text=" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...</a><p>Related - I was just posting on this topic on the Red Delicious thread which popped up on the HN frontpage:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8301185" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8301185</a><p>Edit: I can't see why this gets downvoted, it is clearly on-topic and relevant.
For anyone who's in interested in learning more about bananas, overthrowing governments and installing puppet dictators (before it was cool!) told in a true fast-paced rags-to-riches tale I highly recommend the book: "The Fish That Ate the Whale". So, so good.
Fun fact: if you have ever have those small banana lollies, they taste quite different to bananas now. That is because they were created during the time of the Gros Michel, the old type of banana.<p>And all bananas are cloned from the same variety, one reason this virus is such a concern.
Fun fact, wild bananas are tiny and full of seeds. There's a lot of money being spent sequencing and understanding bananas in order to fight this kind of problem.<p><a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/48150458/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/smart-bunch-scientists-unpeel-bananas-genome/#.VBCtGmSwIhw" rel="nofollow">http://www.nbcnews.com/id/48150458/ns/technology_and_science...</a><p>Because of how domesticated bananas are reproduced, it's a good lesson on the problems with monoculture.
Across the western world, parents with small children are panicking!<p>Across Latin America are panicking because their entire livelihoods are threatened by this.<p>FYI: Bananas are a parents goto fruit when your child is hungry and needs something healthy that is bulky and quick.
The banana cultivar we usually eat is the Canvendish Banana. This cultivar is propagated asexually so in a sense all of the banana plants are of the same clone. Attempting to fight the fungus with genetic engineering is extra tricky because of this, because the banana plants do not reproduce.<p>But maybe someone finds a way. Anyway, I want to remind how papaya cultivation in Hawaii was almost wiped out by a virus disease, but they did some genetic engineering in the 1990's, and after that everything has been fine.<p><a href="http://hawaiitribune-herald.com/sections/news/local-news/papaya-gmo-success-story.html" rel="nofollow">http://hawaiitribune-herald.com/sections/news/local-news/pap...</a><p>Well, Europe still bans the import of GMO food. But at least everyone else gets to eat Hawaiian papaya.
Mono culture where you clone one banana so all other bananas are exactly the same is by design stupid. Imagine you have a disease, compare it to a computer virus. Now exactly all other computers are running the same software, there is a virus that attacks them, all computers are knocked out in one blow. This is how the banana industry are handling it at the moment with cloning.<p>Plus previous scandals Dole dumping poison on their workers
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas!*" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas!*</a>
We don't eat bananas anymore in our house, largely for the reasons outlined in the article.<p>The thumbnail summary: bananas only started being widely consumed in the 1960s because of heavy marketing efforts by Central American railroad builders (they had to do something with the land along the sides of the newly built railroads, and bananas happened to fit).<p>They are heavily chemically treated, more than any other fruit. They've been a monoculture almost since Day 1.<p>Oh, another fun fact, those little stickers on bananas? They were one of the first examples of 'branding'<p>I didn't find this article all that well written or informative. I recommend Chapman's <i>Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World</i><p>I also happened to read John McPhee's <i>Oranges</i> at the same time. The contrast between the orange (an ancient fruit, widely consumed, hardy, with a rich literary tradition) and the banana is stark.<p>Both books, by the way, are great little studies in technology business. Techno-optimism, marketing, PR, globalization, manic CEOs; it's all there.
Related: DamnInteresting did a great article on the history of the banana and its reproductive quirks. It taught me about the historical species of banana that we no longer eat!<p><a href="http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-the-banana/" rel="nofollow">http://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-t...</a>
If it does go to South America, USA might be screwed. America imports all of it's bananas, Chile mostly. Hawaii makes a negligible amount that I think never even leaves Hawaii.<p>Side note, I've been interested in fruits, and the fruit trade so I've been trying to find out more information about how it all works. It is hard. Pretty much any hard data that comes out is from the USDA, no private entity does any sort of research or tracking of the movement of fruits. Farmers either don't care about that sort of stuff to do it on their own, or aren't technologically advanced enough to try and do it themselves.
I recently learned about the Breadfruit[1] at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens on the island of Kaua'i.<p>Apparently, the Polynesians gave up the cultivation of rice (from their native Taiwan) and cultivated the breadfruit instead wherever it grew.<p>The NTBG is trialing the use of breadfruit to combat starvation in tropical nations[2]: hopefully, in the event of a Bananapocalypse, breadfruit could help alleviate the loss.<p>1 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadfruit" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadfruit</a><p>2 <a href="http://ntbg.org/breadfruit/" rel="nofollow">http://ntbg.org/breadfruit/</a>
"scientists haven’t yet found a viable back-up banana to sub in for the Cavendish"<p>What? But what about the Goldfinger? I thought that was Race 4 resistant (Wikipedia seems to agree: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana</a> ), as well as tastier than the relatively bland Cavendish.
I don't know if they contain as much protein and whatnot, but I found peaches give me a similar "satiated" feeling if I eat them in the morning (in case you'll need an alternative fruit soon).
I think we should be hitting with all our fury at this fungus that threatens to eat <i>our</i> bananas.<p>Because as far as I know it also threatens a lot of diverse plant life, especially rare species and living fossils.
so, when do we see bananas in places like this: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1QXCnC-2h4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1QXCnC-2h4</a>