Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino

Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino

Author:Dan Saladino [Saladino, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781473562011
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2021-09-22T16:00:00+00:00


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Kayinja Banana

Uganda

The world’s largest collection of banana diversity isn’t in one of the regions where most bananas grow – in South East Asia, Africa or Latin America. It’s in Belgium. The University of Leuven is home of the International Musa Germplasm Collection (‘Musa’ being the genus the banana belongs to). This is a living treasury of more than 1,500 types of banana with a bewildering array of sizes, colours and flavours. The Blue Java from Indonesia has a soft, unctuous texture and tastes of vanilla ice cream, while the Ele Ele banana, one of the plants introduced to Hawaii by South Pacific settlers, is picked green and cooked as a vegetable. Some types of banana taste like strawberries or apples; some have fuzzy skins; and one Chinese banana is so aromatic it’s been given the name Go San Heong, meaning ‘you can smell it from the next mountain’. Yet despite all its diversity, the banana is the fruit example par excellence of crop monoculture (crops of single variety).

Half of all the bananas in the world are globally traded and grown with the sole purpose of crossing the world in shipping containers. In 2019, this added up to more than 20 billion tonnes,1 £14.7 billion worth, and helped to make the banana the world’s favourite fruit. The international trade is based entirely around just one variety: the Cavendish, a low-price, ubiquitous and super-specialised fruit. The Cavendish dominates the global fruit trade not just because of its taste but because of its biology, its size and shape, the thickness of its skin and the way it ripens. All of these things mean it can be grown, picked and shipped to every port in the world, transported to the biggest cities and the smallest villages. Despite the distances involved, when it arrives on supermarket shelves, it still manages to be one of the cheapest foods on offer.

What makes it the unrivalled superstar of monocultures is that every single Cavendish is a clone. This plant can’t reproduce itself from seed (unlike wild bananas). Instead, some of the suckers the Cavendish grows underground are cut from the main stem and replanted (botanically speaking, the banana is a giant herb and not a tree).2 This makes it a highly prolific plant, but its clonal existence has drawbacks. The Cavendish has no way of evolving and its immune system can’t adapt to new threats. In plantations filled with genetically identical bananas, if a pathogen can get to one plant, it can get to them all. And this is exactly what is happening.

On several continents the Cavendish is dying, entire plantations being killed off by an incurable disease, tropical race 4 (also known as TR4, Panama disease or Fusarium wilt).3 The global food system is now so interconnected the disease has spread between farms on different sides of the world. India, Australia, Africa and Asia have all been affected, including China. Recently, the disease was discovered for the first time in the biggest banana-growing region of all, Latin America.



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