Banana (18 page)

I
N ONE SENSE,
it was business as usual for the banana giants as they moved into the 1980s. Many of the downsides to the way they conducted their affairs in Latin America—interference with governments and ignoring the complaints of workers—continued. But more and more, their actions resembled the norm for a multinational corporation, for better or worse. Chiquita was not that different in the way it behaved than Exxon, General Motors, or Burger King.

If the echoes of the past became more muffled, one distant sound became quietest of all: Panama disease.

The issue was thought to be solved, and the banana companies hadn't just put it behind them—they'd almost completely forgotten it. But the fundamental characteristic that made the malady so devastating to the Gros Michel remained: If one Cavendish happened to get sick, every other Cavendish would. When this problem was considered, if it ever was, it was seen as alarmist—an assertion that the sky above the plantations was falling—or at best hypothetical.

It wasn't.

And in labs and research facilities across the globe, a new set of banana men, more interested in science than empire, began working toward a solution that could finally help the people, throughout the world, who depended most on the fruit.

IT ISN'T UNUSUAL
for packages filled with dirt to appear at Randy Ploetz's Florida doorstep. At any given time, visitors to Ploetz's laboratory at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences will find busy graduate students staring through microscopes at clumps of soil, tending to tiny newborn plants, not much more than a speck of green, or handling larger banana trees grown under tightly controlled conditions in a humid greenhouse.

One box arrived in 1992, from Sumatra, part of the Indonesian island chain. Banana plantations were new to the island (which is a bit larger than Sweden) in the 1980s, but they'd quickly become big business. The burgeoning urban markets of the Far East were demanding more of the fruit, and thousands of acres of rainforest and former oil palm plantations were being shifted to Cavendish bananas. But within a few years of breaking ground, the new farms began to die. An unknown pathogen seemed to be working into the roots of each plant, discoloring leaves, choking off water supplies.

Ploetz is, and has been since the mid-1980s, the botanic equivalent of a crime scene investigator. He is also the world's leading authority on Panama disease. He's authored dozens of papers on the disorder, frequently traveling to remote areas to conduct on-the-ground forensics. Ploetz had heard about the blight that was devastating plantations in Sumatra and other areas halfway around the globe. The symptoms were familiar. It sounded like Panama disease, but that made no sense. These were Cavendish bananas, specifically resistant to that fungal malady. That trait was the very reason the Cavendish was introduced to commercial growers and how it became humanity's most consumed fruit. Ploetz examined the soil samples. His suspicions were confirmed. It seemed impossible, he thought, but there was no denying the reality. “The Cavendish,” he said, “was getting hammered by Panama disease.”

As the banana world remained in a holding pattern of corporate normalcy, as Chiquita and Dole began to diversify, selling other fruits and snack products, Ploetz understood what few others, and certainly not the big banana companies, comprehended: History was beginning to repeat itself.

RANDY PLOETZ DOESN'T JUST STUDY BANANAS
.
He loves them. His academic papers are illustrated with archival images of the great explorers, entrepreneurs, and robber barons who established the banana industry over a century ago. One of Ploetz's main interests is discovering how maladies like Panama disease evolve. Among the biggest questions to emerge during the first outbreaks of the disease in the 1990s was how, exactly, Cavendish suddenly became susceptible to something it had resisted for decades.

Ploetz's answer reaches back to the very beginnings of the idea that plants and animals evolved in an orderly way instead of appearing fully formed and created by a divine hand.

Like Charles Telfair, Alfred Russel Wallace was a British explorer who spent most of his life searching for exotic animal and plant specimens that he could sell to wealthy collectors in his native England. Wallace was a grittier, less well-heeled contemporary of Darwin. The two men came to their conclusions about how life on earth emerged, and moved forward, at about the same time. They share credit for the theory of evolution.

One of Wallace's most important concepts was a hypothetical barrier that has come to be known as Wallace's line. The line serves as a nearly impenetrable wall differentiating biological groupings; it is a physical rift, where the large landmasses that once covered our planet were torn apart by geologic forces, separating like species by oceans and setting them on divergent evolutionary courses. If you look at a diagram of the line, it seems rather modest: It runs along the string of islands that separate Borneo and New Guinea. In some cases, the landmasses on either side of the barrier are less than twenty-five miles apart. But the kinds of flora and fauna found on either side of the line are vastly different. During Wallace's time, kangaroos, koalas, and eucalyptuses were found only on the Australian side. Tigers, squirrels, and rhinos were only endemic north of the divide. Those separations can be seen far beyond the line itself: In birds found only in South America, trees that are seen only in India, and wild bananas that never appeared on our side of the evolutionary frontier.

How did this narrow line turn into an
our side
and
their side
? A brief natural history lesson: Five hundred million or so years ago, the planet was made up of just a few megacontinents. The giant mass that included today's Africa, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Antarctica has been named Gondwanaland by present-day geologists. Over millions of years, the continents now familiar to us broke off and moved apart from each other. What were on contiguous land single species eventually became widely separated and often only distantly related organisms. Evidence of that movement can be found by examining even the most tiny and seemingly insignificant fauna of today. For example, a midge is a species of fly. They live near swampy water nearly everywhere on earth. The remains of ancient midges are often found preserved in amber, fossilized tree sap. Comparing the ancient midges to those living today yields surprising results. “South American and Australian midges are more closely related to each other than they are to New Zealand species,” explains
Understanding Evolution
, an online primer published by the University of California. “And the midges of all three land masses are more closely related to one another than they are to African species. In other words, an insect that may live only a few weeks can tell biogeographers about the wanderings of continents tens of millions of years ago.”

Wallace's line represents not a present barrier, but one of the past: the place where continents were ripped apart by plate tectonics.

(The line was a source of great controversy until the 1960s. Until then, geographers thought the idea that continents could actually move was nonsense. It took intensive studies of variations of the sea floor to prove what seems obvious after a look at a map of the Atlantic Ocean, with the east coast of South America locking like a jigsaw puzzle piece into Africa's western shoreline.)

As with Darwin's basic theories, the particulars of the single divide proposed by Wallace have expanded. There are now believed to be six distinct regions where tectonics created major, permanent species separation, at least until humans started carrying plants and animals across the borders.

This distinguishability of both unique species and ones that have evolved into distantly related and removed cousins even extends to humans. “The lines…seem to divide us into races,” wrote Jared Diamond in a 1997 issue of
Discover
magazine. “The Atlantic Ocean, which separated Europeans from Native Americans; the Sahara, which lay between black sub-Saharan Africans and white North Africans; and the Indian subcontinent, between East Asians and the whites of West Asia and Europe.”

But one thing that was never truly recognized as having undergone the split-and-separate process—and this is key—were pathogens. The idea that bacteria, fungi, and viruses could also have moved apart in the same way was something many scientists hadn't considered—until Randy Ploetz began thinking about his box of dirt.

The first epidemic of Panama disease took place during the early days of international trade. Jungles were cleared by hand. Banana farms were grown one plant at a time. Under those conditions, it took a meandering seventy-five years for the Gros Michel to vanish. What Ploetz and the rest of the banana world are seeing is far more rapid. That the Cavendish fell ill when it arrived in Asia seemed, on one level, easy to understand. It was a newcomer. Then again, this didn't explain how, or why, it was happening to the
Cavendish
. After all, this wasn't something
new
killing the imported bananas. It was the disease that the banana had been chosen to withstand—and
had
withstood, in dozens of other countries.

The answer lay in Wallace's line, and Ploetz's epiphany.

ONE OF THE FIRST SIGNS
of trouble appeared in 1991 at a Malaysian factory farm—known as “estates” in that part of the world—called Nam Heng. The plantation, which had grown mostly palm trees, seemed to be a perfect place to raise bananas. It had plenty of water, a stable workforce, and an existing agricultural infrastructure. Nam Heng's initial efforts were modest by banana standards: forty-two acres—about the same size as California's Disneyland. At first, the tiny plot of bananas seemed healthy. But within six months, something curious began to appear: brown flecks. Leaves brightening with yellow, then wilting. The blight quickly spread, first appearing at nearby farms, then distant ones. It was clear that whatever was affecting the bananas was not something that had come along for the ride from Central America. It was moving too fast for that. Reports began pouring in. A Del Monte plantation covering five thousand acres was among the largest to be afflicted—though it wasn't the size of the operation that surprised growers, it was the plantation's distance from Nam Heng. Del Monte's operation was one thousand miles away, in Sumatra, across a body of water.

By the mid-1990s, even more distant banana farms began to fall, in Halmahera, Papua New Guinea. News accounts of the Malaysian venture occasionally mentioned the growing crisis, usually couching it in wishfully positive terms. A 1995 story in the
New Straits Times
portrayed the issue more as a challenge than a calamity, something the country's respected scientific community could easily brush aside. (There was precedent for this: A few years earlier, Malaysia successfully strengthened rubber trees from Brazil, and the hardier plants allowed the country to quickly surpass its Latin American rivals.) “We
can
breed disease-resistant bananas,” the article quoted one researcher as saying.

Wishful thinking. The reality was a total—and precipitous—wipeout. Statistics released by one grower show a nearly unbelievable fall. In 1991, 1,650 acres of land were cultivated; the next year, the number rises to 1,892. Then it drops to 1,378, rises a bit to 1,440 in 1994 (following an attempt to plant new bananas in recently cleared land), and crashes: just 256 acres in 1995, and zero, zero, zero, zero for the rest of the decade.

PLOETZ FOLLOWED THE PATH OF EVOLUTION
backward, across Wallace's line, retracing the banana's journey to its modern home. Malaysia is a place—possibly the world's best place—for biological superlatives. The nation is warm, wet, and hilly. Mangrove woodlands hug the coasts. The interior is covered in tropical rain forests, which yield to mossy stands of oak as mountains soar as high as 13,000 feet. Rivers flow, sometimes in steep, thundering waterfalls, down from these upper reaches into the forests, homesteads, and pasturelands. This terrain hosts a giddy trove of biological riches: eight thousand species of flowering plants, thousands of kinds of trees, and a spectacular assortment of fauna, including tigers, bears, and rhinos; scores of bird species; and one hundred types of snake.

But as in most of the world, Malaysia's biological diversity is on the decline. Over two thousand of Malaysia's life-forms are found nowhere else. Many face extinction. The region's oversize mahogany trees are among the most threatened on earth; no country exports more of the coveted hardwood.

Farms are replacing Malaysia's fallen forests. About one-quarter of the country's area is now dedicated to agriculture. Millions of Malaysians—ethnic Chinese and Indians along with native Bumiputras (the name means “children of the soil”)—work on factory estates. Malaysia is the world's leading exporter of palm oil and a major producer of sugarcane, pineapples, cacao, and coconuts.

All that land, all those workers, and all that infrastructure made the nation look wide open to growers of commercial bananas. They needed someplace in Asia that had ready shipping facilities, so the delicate fruit could be quickly and efficiently brought to city markets in time for it to spend the banana industry's magic number—seven days, from green to brown-flecked yellow—on store shelves. Even Malaysia's soil seemed right for bananas—after all, they'd evolved there.