In 1876, an Australian farmer noticed that his banana plants were wilting. It turned out to be the first race of the dreaded Panama Disease. Today, 140 years later, a new and improved strain of this same banana-concentrated soil fungus is ravaging the number one fruit industry in the world- and threatening extinction.
By: Julia B. Franklin
The cultivar of banana that you and I enjoy from the grocery store is not nearly the same as the bananas found on shelves as late as the 1960s. The “Gros Michel” banana was the only cultivar of banana produced in mass quantities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Gros Michel began its steady decline in 1910 when scientists discovered a fungus in the soils of many banana plantations. This fungus, named Panama Disease after its rapid spread through that banana-growing region, spread quickly through disease-ridden planting material and caused the Gros Michel to go effectively extinct by the 1960s.
Luckily, there was another cultivar of banana that was being kept in the United Kingdom Botanical Gardens and national fruit collection in Honduras: the Cavendish banana. Though not nearly as rich in taste, the Cavendish banana was resistant to the first strain of Panama Disease. Little did the industry know that there would be a total of four races of Panama Disease with multiple strains. In a lapse of judgement, the worldwide industry thus began replanting the same variety of banana year after year on the same area of land, known as monocropping, the Cavendish. This is the banana that we still eat today.
It did not take long for the Panama Disease to evolve into a new strain that could attack the Cavendish cultivar. In 1994, the cause of this new strain of the fungus was recognized as Tropical Race 4 (TR4), a cloned pathogen that is part of the fourth race of Panama Disease. This was especially bad news for the banana industry this time around because there were no back-up cultivars and because TR4 was an evolved strain that attacked even the more local of banana varieties.
Similar to the demise of the Gros Michel banana, the demise of the Cavendish will be a slow one. Bananas have long been grown both in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. In the last 40 or so years though, TR4 has annihilated the banana industry in Taiwan and greatly hindered those in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia. It was not even until 2013 that the fungus spread to Southeast Asia, officially threatening the entire industry. Therefore, this is not simply an economic issue or an environmental issue, but it is also a social issue. The nutritional value of bananas is a central part of some of these regions’ diets, namely in developing countries where they depend on locally grown produce for nourishment; and though many of the bananas grown globally are exported, 85% of bananas are sent to local markets.
Nadia Ordonez and her co-writers explain the problem precisely in their essay “Worse Comes to Worst: Bananas and Panama Disease…” when they write:
Clearly, the current expansion of the Panama disease epidemic is particularly destructive due to the massive monoculture of susceptible Cavendish bananas (2)
Monoculture is largely frowned upon by environmental scientists, as it is harmful for the nourishment of the soil and for resisting soil- born fungi, but it is widely practiced by farmers to mass produce highly demanded crops, such as bananas. Though there have been vague attempts at managing the spread of the Panama disease, monoculture will never allow for a full removal of the fungus. This epidemic calls for drastic measures, which have not yet been taken, and quarantine campaigns are an essential place to start. With farmers and workers moving in and out of fields with the same shoes and equipment, the fungus will only spread faster, thus the quarantine of these infected plantations is necessary.
There is one strategy that has been widely utilized, however, and this is the cloning of the Cavendish cultivar. Spraying the soil with fungi-resistant chemicals is typically not only just harmful to the environment, but in some cases it is also against the law, as putting chemicals into the soil is frowned upon on many fronts. Therefore, because the attack can not be on the soil, the defense is the cloning of the plant. This cloning is done through tissue culture, as this variety reproduces asexually. These clones are partially unaffected by TR4, but when a soil fungus is threatening the most internationally popularly produced fruit, “partially” does not cut it. Though this is an important approach to the banana crisis, it is not the only one that should be utilized. As our forefathers and foremothers before us that decided to clone the Cavendish cultivar, the industry should be looking into the cloning of new, more TR4- resistant varieties of banana. There are more locally grown varieties of banana that could similarly meet the needs of the Cavendish banana consumer, therefore this is not a forsaken option.
There are two main steps in the move towards maintaining the existence of the edible banana. The first of these two steps is to spread national and international awareness that the banana is important to the economy, is essential in the nutrition of people in developing and developed countries, as well as being important environmentally. This growing awareness will allow the banana industry and the scientists supporting the effort to invest more money in the research necessary to take steps towards cloning and saving the banana, whether it be the Cavendish or taking resistant traits a different variety.
Conclusively: this is a call for action! Bananas are an important staple in almost everyone around the globe’s diet, it is a vital cash crop for both tropical and subtropical climactic regions around the world, and the demise of this specific crop would be a social injustice to countless developing countries that rely on the banana industry. The original mass-produced, monocropped cultivar of banana, the Gros Michel, was labeled as extinct in the 1960s because of the specific way they were produced and monocropped. This was a clear warning against monoculture and its inability to resist soil-born fungi. Therefore, the industry’s approach to finding TR4 in Cavendish banana crops worldwide is not the appropriate strategy. According to Ordonez, “The current TR4 epidemic and inherent global attention should be the wake- up call for these much needed strategy changes” (3). There clearly needs to be more of an awareness of this global issue and a surge of funds put towards research efforts. Hopefully the world’s favorite fruit will be around in 50 years to tell the tale.