The Plight of the Cavendish Banana

CONTRIBUTOR: Heleene Tambet

ART: Tim Anderson, Dan Bransfield

While the number of breakfast cereals on supermarket shelves is an uncountable entity, the singularity of our beloved banana may threaten its existence. On the edges of the store, fruit is stacked into a colorful, eye-catching cornucopia, but the contents of those fruit piles indicate the opposite trend.

The deadly Panama disease, caused by Fusarium oxysporum, is a soil borne pathogen that erodes the roots and vascular integrity of the plant, and it’s destroying banana plantations across the globe. Thousands of hectares have already been wiped out in Philippines, Indonesia, China and Australia. Once the pandemic reaches Central America, the banana as we know it is in serious trouble.

While it is widely agreed that the fruit is native to Southeast Asia, where bananas have been cultivated for more than 7,000 years, its single origin is still unresolved (though Papua New Guinea is the most recognized source). After domestication in the Philippines, the fruit quickly dispersed across the tropics, reached India, Oceania and Australia, and arrived in Africa around 1,000 BCE, where it was quickly established as an irreplaceable staple.

The thirty pounds of bananas that the average American annually consumes is all of a single variety. Astonishingly, ninety-nine percent of what reaches the U.S. is a type of banana called Cavendish. It wasn’t until the dawn of 20th century that banana was dominated by a single-variety. On the contrary, there have been over a thousand banana species recorded in the wild. In Indonesia, locals love their Pisang Kepok, Kluthuk, Susu, and Khabu Banana. In Uganda, it’s Kayinja, Ndiizi, and Nakitembe. Many Polynesian nations have historically relied on Hua Moa and Ele Ele bananas as staple food. The orange Karat from Micronesia contains 100 times more vitamin A carotenoids, and Señorita from Phillipines has found to be many times sweeter than the Cavendish. So far, however, none of those varieties has sparked a commercial interest.

While genetic diversity sounds like a happy concept, the purchasing habits of Western consumers says otherwise. We do not want to eat every banana. We hunt for sweetness, soft texture and long shelf-life. We associate our bananas with creaminess and dessert. Seeds are unwanted. Although most of us will not claim so individually, a slight deviation from what is seen as a “regular” fruit results in a dramatic plunge in demand. The corporate food companies responsible for the global import and distribution of bananas reinforce this quandary by limiting options, and consumers, unaware of the environmental catastrophe of monocropping, continue in their unwitting participation.

Gros Michel, a sweet, bright yellow cultivar of banana, was the first one to take over commercial production and trade in the beginning of the 20th century. Meticulously developed by plant scientists, the variety perfectly fit the preferences of the daily consumer. It was seedless, non-acidic, and traveled well. In Latin America, thousands of hectares of biodiverse tropical forests were taken down and turned into vast Gros Michel plantations.

Gros Michel was also the first one to become a victim of its own success. Uniform genetic composition and singular planting of the crop made it extremely vulnerable to pests or disease. Gros Michel, like many other monocrops, was sterile, and could only be reproduced by propagation via cloning.

When Panama disease emerged in the 1950s, the entire global banana production was suddenly on the verge of disappearance. Panama disease, uncontrollable with chemical sprays, makes the leaves of a banana wilt and crumble, resulting in lack of photosynthesis and protection from the sun. The plant, no longer able to produce sugars, is left to die. Plantations of Gros Michel were wiped out across the globe, but fortunately, plant scientists and growers were quick to react.

In search of a banana resistant to the disease, they stumbled upon Cavendish. Most banana production takes place in the tropics, but the story of Cavendish is slightly more exotic. The variety was named after one of the richest and most influential aristocratic families in England.

Back in the 19th century, the gardener of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire was in constant search of exotic fruits to earn the favor of the British royal family. In 1830, one of his experiments resulted in a banana plant from the colony of Mauritius being planted in the majestic Cavendish family garden. Several years later, an exemplar of the plant, then carrying the name of the family, was taken as a gift to South Sea Islands, where its global conquers started.

A map showing the spread of Panama disease as of 2017. It was first found in Thailand and hit the African coast for the first time in 2016. As of today, Central America remains in constant fear of the arrival of the disease.

Though shipping of Cavendish requires more care, and its sweetness level does not compare to Gros Michel, its quality was found to be the highest among cultivars resistant to Panama disease. The production of Cavendish was given a boost, and it quickly took over as a single variety of most of the big scale plantations globally.

The global banana industry relies almost entirely on huge farms that exclusively practice monocropping, growing nothing but bananas, and no more than one variety. Favorable weather, redundant crops, and year-around food supply makes an ideal environment for pests to thrive. Banana producers spend a third of their income on controlling these pests. On average, chemicals to control worms, weeds and funguses amounts to approximately one litre of active ingredients for every forty pound box of bananas exported to consumers in the global north.

These are the conditions in which the fungus that caused Panama disease were adapted. A new strain of it has emerged, Panama disease TR-4. It was first found in Thailand, and now, after more than 10,000 hectares of Cavendish have already been wiped out in Southeast Asia, the outbreak has spread to Australia and the Middle East. In 2016, the first case was discovered in Tanzania, Africa. As of now, the heart of banana production for US consumers — Central America — remains in constant fear of Panama disease reaching the continent.

Among the limited ways to control the disease, containment and quarantine are perhaps the most straightforward. But at the end of the day, Panama disease is just a fungus living in soil. Who can guarantee that a well-intentioned traveller, coming from the Philippines to an American port, isn’t carrying a bit of soil on the bottoms of their shoes?

Even still, the most widely praised plan on table is the same as the old — simply find a new, resistant banana. Essentially we have two options. The first is the same way we’ve been building “resistance” in banana plants, by picking the varieties with preferred characteristics, and use them to breed new, stronger cultivars. This is something agronomists have always done, crisis or not. The process, however, takes many years. The second path — the faster and more modern one — is decoding banana genes. Often stigmatized for its environmental uncertainty, genetic engineering could be used to grow resistance in bananas with genetic material from other fruits or vegetables.

Regardless of which option we choose, the inconvenient truth is that a global food system means people from all over the world are impacted by the potential demise of the banana. After all, 85% of the world’s banana production is used for local consumption in tropical regions. Americans might consume 30 pounds of bananas per year, but Ugandans, for instance, consume 550 pounds. All African nations considered, the livelihoods of more 100 million small-scale farmers would be affected if bananas were to go extinct.

Those small-scale farmers also have a third solution to offer. Bananas for home-consumption are grown in a mixed system, along with cacao, avocado, mango, corn or citrus. These production systems rely on fewer (if any) pesticides, and have shown more resilience to a changing climate — a rather burning issue for tropical growing regions in coming decades.

While breeding a new variety could be a solution for the current problem, it doesn’t do much to alter the cause, the design of the production system. As it stands, we just have to admit that its storage life, travel tolerance, and compatibility with Chiquita’s color charts make Cavendish irreplaceable in the current food system.

Nature might have 1,000 different bananas, but we have not been able to use this diversity for our benefit. Until our demands of what we are presented shifts, this will continue to be the case. If the world actually utilized the thousand nutritious, unique varieties of banana, we’d spare scientists across the planet working tirelessly to find us a solution — if they still can.