Two weeks ago, at a conference in South Africa, scientists met to discuss how to contain a deadly banana disease outbreak in nearby Mozambique, Africa. At fault was a fungus that continues its march around the planet.
In recent years, it has spread across Asia and Australia, devastating plants there that bear the signature yellow supermarket fruit. Only days after the meeting, however, a devastating new survey of the stricken Mozambique farm was released. Scientists at the conference assumed that the fungus was limited to a single plot. The new report suggested the entire plantation was infested, expanding 125 diseased acres to more than 3,500. All told, 7 million banana plants were doomed to wilt and rot.
“The future looks bleak,” says Altus Viljoen, the South African plant pathologist who organized the conference. “There’s no way they’ll be able to stop any further spread if they continue to farm.” Worse, he says, the disease’s rapid spread endangers banana crops beyond Mozambique’s borders.
Chiquita is now researching a replacement banana for the Cavendish. One possibility is a modified version of the fruit developed in Taiwan; the “GCTCV 219” is sweeter than standard Cavendish, and takes a little longer to harvest, but is highly resistant to Panama Disease. The variety is currently being tested in the Philippines and Australia, and it has the market advantage of not being a GMO banana; the technique used to develop it involves “somoclonal variation,” or hand-selection and rebreeding of hardier varieties. (The problem with GMO bananas isn’t the fruit or the technology, it’s that most consumers wouldn’t buy them, banana marketers say.)
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Other possibilities include alternate breeds. Those would require new packaging technology, but the industry overcame that obstacle during the original Gros Michel changeover. Or, if consumer and regulatory resistance breaks down, a transgenic banana, perhaps crossed with Fusarium-resistant peppers.
Read the full, original article: Has the end of the banana arrived?
