Scientists have warned that bananas could disappear from supermarket shelves within a decade. The world’s favourite fruit is under attack from two fungal diseases which are devastating plantations around the world. Experts have compared the desperate situation to the potato famine in Ireland 150 years ago.
Banana plants are under threat because of their genetic development. The wild variety of the banana produces a fruit that is inedible because it contains hundreds of hard seeds. Almost all of the banana plants today are cuttings of mutant wild bananas found by ancient farmers in the jungles of South-East Asia. These rare varieties, discovered by our ancestors, produce delicious edible bananas without seeds. The main drawback of these plants, however, is that they are completely sterile.
Over the centuries farmers have grown bananas by taking cuttings from these original mutant varieties. The result is a fruit which has been at a genetic standstill for over 10,000 years. Normally plants use seed reproduction to continuously change their gene pool. They are able to build up variety within the species so that some plants can survive the attack of a serious disease. Because the mutant bananas cannot breed, they do not have that type of protection.
Banana plantations around the world are now under threat from two diseases, Panama disease and black Sigatoka. The Brazilian banana crop has recently been devastated by a version of Panama disease which does not respond to pesticide sprays. Plantations in other parts of the world can only survive by using massive amounts of fungicide to keep the Sigatoka disease at bay.
The situation is particularly worrying in developing countries where around half a billion people eat bananas as part of their staple diet. Poor farmers are unable to afford the chemicals which can sometimes keep the diseases under control. When the Sigotaka fungus reached Uganda in 1980, farmers could do little more than watch many of their plants die. Banana production dropped by forty per cent in the space of a year.
Scientists are now working hard to produce other varieties of banana. One possibility is to develop genetically modified bananas but many growers are worried about consumer resistance. The other alternative is to breed new varieties from an extremely rare, seed-carrying edible banana. In Honduras, scientists have peeled and sieved 400 tonnes of bananas and found 15 seeds for breeding. They have come up with a fungus-resistant variety which could be grown without the use of pesticides.
However, these new bananas haven’t proved very popular so far with consumers. Many people claim that they taste more like apples than bananas. If bananas don’t vanish from our supermarkets in the future, they may taste very different to the ones we enjoy today.