Humans Made the Banana Perfect – But Soon, It’ll Be Gone

The United Fruit Company, known today as Chiquita Brands, has dominated the production and global sale of bananas for more than a century. In the 19th century, the company and its competitors bred and cloned the banana into one standard variety – a hardy, highly productive and sweet-tasting fruit named Gros Michel – and grew it across Central America and some parts of Africa and Asia. But by cultivating only one genetically identical banana variety, the banana industry failed to heed the lesson of the 19th-century coffee industry in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In the early 1800s, the British started to cultivate a single variety of coffee across large parts of the island to answer growing demand for the beverage at home. As the coffee plants were genetically identical and planted close together in vast monocultures, they were also susceptible to the same pathogens. Coffee rust ended up destroying the coffee plants in Ceylon, and coffee growers reverted to growing tea on their plantations.

“Any pathogen that could attack a single banana plant, even one, would be able to kill all of them.”

Similarly, Panama disease, or fusarium wilt, started to destroy Gros Michel banana plantations across Guatemala and the rest of the world by the early 1900s. The United Fruit Company scrambled to find a new variety of banana that was resistant to the pathogen and looked and tasted like the Gros Michel. The Cavendish banana met the criteria. A successful marketing campaign allowed the banana industry to boost worldwide sales of the Cavendish, which practically became the only variety of banana available in stores outside native banana-growing regions. Countries like Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama and Belize, whose number one export item is the banana, came to depend strongly on the success of the crop. But a new strain of a pathogen closely related to the one that caused Panama disease has started to spread across Asia and East Africa. It is now also threatening banana plantations in Central America.

“The more we feed ourselves according to our most primitive desires, the more we create a world dominated by just a few productive crops – crops that are threatened by their very commonness.”

Today’s agriculture industry has standardized almost all commonly consumed, high-yield food crops into a small number of species that could all meet a similar fate. The only way banana growers were able to save the banana from extinction in the early 1900s was to find a new, disease-resistant variety among wild banana plants. Going forward, protecting biodiversity is thus the only way humans can preserve their food supply.