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Marty Offline OP
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These Madagascar bananas could be next.

How the global banana industry is killing the world's favorite fruit

During harvest last year, banana farmers in Jordan and Mozambique made a chilling discovery. Their plants were no longer bearing the soft, creamy fruits they'd been growing for decades. When they cut open the roots of their banana plants, they saw something that looked like this:


A banana plant ravaged by Tropical Race 4.

Scientists first discovered the fungus that is turning banana plants into this rotting, fibrous mass in Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Since then the pathogen, known as the Tropical Race 4 strain of Panama disease, has slowly but steadily ravaged export crops throughout Asia. The fact that this vicious soil-borne fungus has now made the leap to Mozambique and Jordan is frightening. One reason is that it's getting closer to Latin America, where at least 70% of the world's $8.9-billion-a-year worth of exported bananas is grown.

Randy Ploetz, professor of plant pathology at University of Florida who discovered Tropical Race 4, says it may already be in Latin America. "The story on the Mozambique situation was that workers brought over to establish the plantations-some of them were from Latin America," he says. "And this is an insidious disease in that it can move� by soil-contaminated machinery, tools-that kind of thing."

Chiquita, the $548-million fruit giant with the world's largest banana market share, is downplaying the risk. "It's certainly not an immediate threat to banana production in Latin America [where Chiquita's crops are]," Ed Lloyd, spokesman for Chiquita, told the Charlotte Business Journal in late December, explaining that the company is using a "risk-mitigation program" to approach the potential spread.

Even if it takes longer to arrive, the broader ravaging of the commercial banana appears inevitable. And we don't need to imagine what that would mean for banana exports-the exact scenario has already happened. Starting in 1903, Race 1, an earlier variant of today's pathogen, ravaged the export plantations of Latin America and the Caribbean. Within 50 years, Race 1 drove the world's only export banana species, the Gros Michel, to virtual extinction. That's why 99% of the bananas eaten in the developed world today are a cultivar called the Cavendish, the only export-suitable banana that could take on Race 1 and live to tell.

Over the half-century it took to wipe out the Gros Michel, Race 1 caused at least $2.3 billion in damage (around $18.2 billion in today's terms.) And that was in the commercial heart of global banana production. Tropical Race 4, by comparison, has damaged $400 million in banana crops in the Philippines alone.

But the bigger difference now is that, compared its 20th-century cousin, Tropical Race 4 is a pure killing machine-and not just for Cavendishes



And at $8.9 billion, bananas grown for export are only a fraction of the $44.1 billion in annual banana and plantain production-in fact, bananas are the fourth-most valuable global crop after rice, wheat, and milk. Where are the rest of those bananas sold? Nearly nine-tenths of the world's bananas are eaten in poor countries, where at least 400 million people rely on them for 15-27% of their daily calories. And that's the really scary part. Since the first Panama disease outbreak, bananas have evolved from snacks into vital sustenance. And this time there's no back-up banana variety to feed the world with instead.


Tropical Race 4′s global reach. Note that while Race 1 is in many more places, far fewer banana varieties are susceptible.

Meet the Cavendish: the world's multi-billion-dollar banana

Quick-think of a banana. Chances are good that, you're imagining something closer to what's on the right, and not the left:


On the left, Musa velutina, on the right the Cavendish.

That iconic yellow one is a Cavendish. Americans love it so much that they buy more bananas than apples and oranges combined. It might be the most famous, but Cavendishes make up less than half of the bananas grown around the world. The fuzzy, stubby pink bunch on the left-a Musa velutina-is an example of the incredibly diverse range of banana species that grow around the world.

Native to Assam, India, Musa velutinas are much softer and sweeter than Cavendishes. So why don't we see Musa velutinas-or other species-in developed world supermarkets? Quality control is one; since they reproduce, the Musa velutinas vary in size and shape. Plus, the pink fruit's hard seeds can nick a filling. And they're not as "productive" as Cavendishes-meaning, they produce less volume of fruit per plant. Cavendishes also take a long time to ripen and have tough exteriors, which allow them to travel far without going bad or getting banged up along the way.


These Philippines bananas don't look much like the Cavendish.

The developed world prizes bananas as a food of convenience-it's cheap, portable and reasonably healthy. In poor countries, however, bananas are often a basic source of nourishment for at least 400 million people. The average person in Uganda, Gabon, Ghana and Rwanda relies on bananas and plantains for more than 300 calories each day-around 16% of the UN's nourishment threshold (and bear in mind that around 20% of the 74 million people living in those four countries are undernourished). Roughly 80% of all bananas consumed locally are vulnerable to Tropical Race 4.

And while millions of farmers feed their families with home-grown bananas, many millions more use income from growing them to buy other crops. Bananas are the most important export commodity for Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize. They're in the top three in Colombia, the Philippines, Guatemala, Honduras, and Cameroon. That's a lot of the developing-world economy reliant on a very vulnerable crop. "This disease is a problem, not only because of its potential impact on the price and availability of our favorite fruit, but also because it's a life-changing event for the people in developing countries who rely on bananas as a staple food and incomes," Alice Churchill, a scientist studying plant biology at Cornell University, told the Cornell Sun, "Those affected by [Panama disease] lose both their livelihoods and an important source of nutrition."

The deadliest disease the banana world's ever seen

Panama disease is so virulent that some call it the "HIV of banana plantations" (paywall). Here's why it's so lethal:

  • It strikes from inside the plant. The yellowing leaves are often the first thing farmers notice. That happens because Tropical Race 4 creeps into a banana plant's roots, spreading up its vascular system and strangling the supply of water and nutrients. As the banana plant's leaves wilt, it becomes harder and harder to conduct photosynthesis, leaving its fruits stunted. Eventually the plant simply dies.
  • Nothing can kill it. There are other big, bad banana-killers out there. Some, like Black Sigatoka and burrowing nematode worms, sound as nasty as they are (some, like a nefarious Asian virus called Bunchy Top, don't.) But spray all of those with enough chemicals and they back off. Not so with Panama disease. Once a plantation has it, nothing gets rid of it.
  • It's stealthy. The thing clings to shoes, equipment, luggage, or whatever else touches contaminated dirt, making it incredibly contagious. All it takes is one clump of soil to spread Tropical Race 4.
  • It plays a long game. Dead plants leave behind spores, allowing the fungus to lie dormant in the ground for decades in wait for new crops to blight.
  • It's confusing. The one proven prophylactic is rigorous quarantine, which Australia has implemented to good effect. A big worry with Latin America at the moment is that, because Tropical Race 4 causes symptoms that look like the old kinds of Panama disease-Race 1 and 2, which are still present in Latin America-farmers might not realize their crops are infected until it's too late to quarantine, says University of Florida's Ploetz.
  • And Tropical Race 4 is way deadlier than Race 1. When Race 1 wiped out the Gros Michel, the volume of other banana species also susceptible was small. How things have changed. As much as 85% of global banana output is vulnerable to Tropical Race 4.


Tropical Race 4′s route to domination.

Before the Cavendish, there was Big Mike

The knitting of our fate with that of Tropical Race 4 began more than a century ago, with a banana far tastier than any most Quartz readers have ever had. While its famously creamy flavor made the Gros Michel-or "Big Mike"-a big hit around the Caribbean among small-time farmers, its tough, thick skin and its high yield are what landed this cultivar in cereal bowls and lunch bags far beyond the tropics.

Like all domesticated bananas, the vast majority of Gros Michel didn't carry seeds. So how did they reproduce? You simply would cut off a chunk of a banana tree, plant it, and wait for your banana tree to sprout. In other words, the bananas eaten commercially are all clones.

Those qualities also gave rise of the industrialization of banana-growing, as they allowed scrappy American entrepreneurs to construct banana empires throughout Latin American rainforests, often building railroads to ports in exchange for long-term land rights. These banana barons pioneered the industrial agriculture model familiar today, maximizing land, minimizing labor, and vertically integrating in order to send their product far and wide.


The docks of the United Fruit company in Honduras, 1954.

That let them sell Big Mikes for cheap-an important development given that in 1899, the fruit was still found mainly in posh hotels, where it often was accompanied with instructions on how to peel it. That next year, Americans ate around 15 million bunches of bananas. Within a decade that had surged to 40 million, making them more popular than apples and oranges, as Dan Koeppel documents in his book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. At a time when apples and oranges were prohibitively expensive to most Americans, the banana was marketed for mass consumption. United Fruit successfully styled it as the fruit of the common man, its popularity reflected in the slapstick ubiquity of slipping on banana peels found in the films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and other comedians, as Koeppel points out.

From there, United Fruit ramped up marketing to further the banana's American conquest, hiring doctors to endorse mashed bananas as baby food and setting up a "home economics department" to get images of bananas in front of housewives and in textbooks. After its test kitchens struck upon the idea of the banana as the perfect breakfast on the go, the company began offering coupons on cereal boxes, linking bananas and breakfast cereal for the first time, writes Koeppel.


United Fruit marketing from the 1950s ingeniously targeted housewives and children. The image on the left appeared in Ladies Home Journal.

To ramp up production while preserving its margins, United Fruit began burnishing its famously bloody reputation for union-busting. (A 1928 crackdown on striking United Fruit workers in Colombia inspired the massacre in Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez's novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude). The strategic importance of the crop meant that the troops of both Latin American dictatorships-the namesake of "banana republics"-and the US government often enforced United Fruit's will on unruly workers.

The twilight of the Gros Michel

However, in 1903, United Fruit encountered an enemy that all the military interventions in the world couldn't stop. It first showed up in Panama-a blight that wilted leaves and infected fruits until the entire plant toppled over and died, usually before it could bear any fruit. Once it appeared, it laid waste to a region's plantations, usually at a gradual pace, but sometimes with devastating speed. It needed only five years to wipe out all of Suriname's banana plantations.

As you undoubtedly guessed, the pestilence in question is none other than Panama disease, Race 1. As whole plantations failed, United Fruit and others made the obvious choice: they picked up and moved somewhere else in Latin America.

But the blight followed. After it wiped out plantations in Costa Rica, Panama disease followed United Fruit to Guatemala. And then to Nicaragua, then Colombia and then Ecuador. By 1960, 77 years after it had appeared, Panama disease had wiped the Gros Michel out of every export plantation on the face of the planet.

Why was Panama disease unstoppable?

In the Gros Michel's rise and fall, the banana industry struggled with the paradox that plagues all industrial agriculture crops. Natural reproduction is bad for short-term profits. The way to grow a consistent product at yields that achieve economies of scale is to stamp out the risks of diversity and imperfection that happens when genes reshuffle. To boost profit, you then grow that crop to the exclusion of less valuable species.

This is what's called a "monoculture" or "monocrop," the cultivation of a single plant species, usually on a massive, standardized scale. These things come at a cost, though. Just as their genetic similarity makes for cheap, large-scale production, it also prevents monocrops from adapting to attack from pests or disease. (Other disastrous consequences of monocrops include that farmers soak their crops in ever-increasing amounts of harmful chemicals and that this scale of growing is incredibly taxing on the environment.)

CLICK HERE for the rest of this important story


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Marty Offline OP
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Bananas under threat in the Caribbean

Caribbean banana producing countries have been warned to be on their guard against the introduction of the fusarium wilt disease regarded as the most destructive to the banana industry.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that the disease has already spread from Asia to Africa and the Middle-East, and is now "menacing" the Americas.

To raise awareness, the FAO said the issue will be on the agenda of a series of upcoming meetings in Kenya, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago, with the aim of addressing a range of issues related to TR4, including developing action plans for its prevention, monitoring and containment.

The FAO said while the banana crop is vulnerable to a number of diseases in various parts of the world, including the Black Sigatoka disease, Xanthomonas Wilt (BXW), Bunchy Top Disease (BBTD) and Fusarium Wilt, Fusarium's soil-borne nature makes it "especially challenging".

According to the FAO, banana is the eighth most important food crop in the world and the fourth most important food crop among the world's least-developed countries, including the Caribbean.

It said the TR4 trace of the disease - also known as Panama disease - is posing a serious threat to production and export of the popular fruit, with grave repercussions for the banana value chain and livelihoods.

The Reporter


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Bananas in Danger: TR4 Panama Disease

By Evin Zabaneh Belize Ag Report

The next time you bite into a banana, take a moment to savor the delicious treat. With its sweet, consistent taste and creamy texture, it is no wonder that bananas are the world's most popular fruit. What most do not realize as they are peeling away its golden skin to devour the scrumptious pulp is that bananas are in danger. A serious fungal disease threatens to devastate the world-wide banana industry. The culprit: Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. Cubense, which causes Fusarium wilt or Panama disease, particularly Tropical Race 4.

According to ProMusa, an organization dedicated to promoting banana industry news and science, the fungus survives in the soil and "enters the plant through the roots and colonizes the xylem vessels thereby blocking the flow of water and nutrients." Once water flow is obstructed, the plant's leaves wilt, its base splits open, and the plant later dies.

This is not the first time banana producers have had to deal with Panama disease. Initial reports of the original fungus were noted in 1874 in Southeast Asia. The disease was identified and researched as it began taking a devastating toll on the Gros Michel banana, which was the common commercially-produced banana. By the 1890s, the disease had reached Central America and proceeded to spread, wiping out plantations.

Fortunately, by the 1950s an alternate variety banana, the Cavendish, made its way to center stage as replacement for Gros Michel. It was resistant to the lethal fungus and was an acceptable substitute for the banana market.

By the 1970s, banana producers in Southeast Asia began noticing Cavendish banana plants with the same symptoms that Gros Michel plants had when infected with Fusarium wilt. Since Cavendish bananas were thought to be resistant, this prompted further investigation, which led to the discovery of a new strain of Fusarium oxysporum-one that the Cavendish banana could not withstand.

The earlier version of Fusarium oxysporum that impacted the Gros Michel banana is categorized as Race 1. The strain that invades Cavendish bananas, and threatens the current world-wide banana industry is called Tropical Race 4, or TR4.

TR4 has been identified in Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, China, the Philippines, Jordan and Mozambique, according to ProMusa. After the disease reaches an uninfected area, it spreads quickly, wiping out thousands of acres of cultivated bananas. The fungus can be spread though several media. Run-off water can convey the spores to new locations. Soils will hold the fungus for years, long after banana plants are gone. Furthermore, animals, vehicles, footwear and equipment can transmit infected soil. Producers can even spread the fungus by planting plants that appear healthy, but are infected.

"The real problem with Panama disease is that the incubation period is anywhere between 18 months and two years," said Sam Mathias, CEO of the Belize Banana Growers Association, or BGA. Many places could actually have the fungus present in their soils but not see any symptoms in their plants for two years. Once the fungus is present, there is no treatment. According to the World Banana Forum, "There is no viable, fully effective treatment of soil to control Fusarium wilt in the field."

Although TR4 has not reached the Americas, its spread remains a possibility. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations recently advised countries to take action to stop the expansion of the disease. Recommendations by the FAO and World Banana Forum include raising awareness of the disease, implementing preventative measures and employing phytosanitary practices. The BGA is urging the Belize Agricultural Health Authority (BAHA) to "introduce measures to ensure the disease doesn't enter Belize," said Mathias. If proper prevention procedures are not put in place, TR4 could reach Belize and present a bleak situation for southern Belize's Banana Belt. Emir Cruz of BAHA said the organization has requested a risk analysis about the disease and plans to work with the BGA to raise awareness of the disease. Cruz also said BAHA is working to secure funds for training qualified officers to assess possible threats of Panama disease at ports of entry. "We are very vigilant with any threat," Cruz said.

Although the outlook for the banana industry seems grim, researchers are studying resistant plants and experimenting with alternate varieties to explore all possible options. The battle against Fusarium wilt will likely be long and hard fought, but stakeholders in the banana industry will make every effort to ensure consumers will continue to enjoy their favorite fruit into the future.

Editor's Note: Evin Zabaneh is the operator of Bunches of Fun Banana Farm Tours near Placencia. She has a Master of International Agriculture Degree from Oklahoma State University.

The BELIZE AG REPORT



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