Banana (21 page)

The part that I thought was coolest came next. The biggest problem with a conventional hybrid banana, as I learned both from Swennen and during my visit to Honduras, is time. With a conventional hybrid, you've got to wait weeks or even years for a growing plant to emerge. Even then, you'll need several generations to determine if the qualities you've tried to breed into the new banana actually exist. With genetic transformation, that information can be obtained in just days or hours. The trick is to create flags, or markers, that indicate whether a change has occurred. These markers are supplementary genes that impart an additional, easy-to-see quality to the transformed organism. A common marker gene is one that confers resistance to antibiotics. Scientists insert the marker, and then dose the transformed organism with the antibiotic. Only the ones that have picked up resistance will survive; the marker gene acts as an indicator that the real-deal genes have actually come along for the ride. Other marker genes are called “reporter” genes. They provide a visual cue that the transformation has taken place. Some reporters genes actually emit light—like a firefly—when activated. You can see them glowing in the dark.

REMY AND I MOVE AWAY FROM THE TEST TUBES
,
toward a container filled with petri dishes. These microbananas are a week old, and many are turning black, succumbing to the bacteria. They'll soon be discarded. For the next four months, the winnowing process will continue; after six months, the cells will have become plantlets and are transferred to test tubes.

After a year in vitro, the infant bananas head out to the field. At this point, the process becomes more traditional. Genetic transformation of bananas is efficient in the early stages because you can produce thousands of transformed organisms very quickly. Once the plants start to look like plants, the growth pattern is the same as with any other banana. “You need to see the plant go through several cycles, probably five years,” Remy says, “in order to find out if what you've been trying to obtain is actually there and functional.”

A test-tube banana, at the Belgian
banana genetics lab.

Or that's the way it should work. I ask Remy if there's any place I can go to see those test-tube fruits actually growing on a plantation. He frowns. He's bombarded and vectored tens of thousands of genes into a never-ending parade of test tubes and petri dishes. “I'm talking about the ideal timeline,” he says. “But that's not the way it works at the moment.”

I ask him why. His frown deepens. “It has nothing to do with science,” he says.

T
HE WORD PHIL ROWE USED
to describe the banana's receptivity to conventional breeding was “intractable.” He meant “stubborn.” When time is short, it would be more accurate to say:
impossible
. The first epidemic of Panama disease appeared in a less-connected world and took most of a century to run its course—and even then conventional banana-breeding methods crawled along, unable to keep pace. Black Sigatoka spread across Africa in less than a decade, reducing crop efficiency by more than two-thirds by the 1980s. Panama disease has been on the move for about twenty years now. That malady's boundaries—China to the east, India to the west, and all the way through Australia to the south—cover a much larger range than Africa's. Its speed is especially disconcerting given the bodies of water separating the afflicted areas.

Since the traditional method of creating hybrids—hand pollinating, hunting for seeds in thousands of bananas, and then searching for the right qualities in millions of fruit—takes so long, today's banana producers must rely on external techniques to build resistance to ailments. That means practices that look much like those used in the past by United Fruit and the rest of the early banana industry: New plantations in virgin forest; applications of chemicals; environmental damage—the cycle that began a century ago continues. When an airborne blight strikes, the malady must be fought with expensive applications of chemicals, dumped from the sky.

The banana has changed the world, but for all practical purposes, it can't change itself, and it has so far not cooperated with human efforts to make it turn a new leaf. The techniques being developed by the scientists in Leuven and at similar labs around the world—in Australia, Canada, Brazil, India, and a dozen other countries—may be the banana's only hope.

But something strange happens when the mechanics of banana biotechnology are explained. Scientists like Swennen and Remy see it all the time. So did I as I was researching this book.

People become uncomfortable. Even scared. When they learn about modifying a Polynesian banana to contain extra quantities of vitamin A, they seem to approve. When they learn that the marker genes come from fishes (it's true), they're horrified. It doesn't matter that none of this foreign genetic material would actually get into a growing banana plant (no more than a socket wrench would get into your car's oil supply after you've visited a Jiffy Lube). People cringe. They don't like the idea of marine life, or any member of the animal kingdom, having anything to do with a banana. “Don't mix anything that has eyes with my fruit,” one friend told me when I described the process to her.

Even straightforward banana-improvement projects—only affecting taste or ripening or the ability to fight in-the-field maladies—unnerve a large number of consumers. Crosses with radishes and, of all things, azaleas may help bananas resist Panama disease, since varieties of both of the added plants fight fungus fairly well. Other lab-bred bananas have successfully overcome Sigatoka or gained more controllable ripening and nearly bruise-proof flesh.

Yet, the truth is that it
is
unnatural to mix fish with fruit, no matter how harmless; the idea of a vegetable meeting a banana is less discomforting, but it still
feels
like something beyond the normal.

“Genetic transformation,” Rony Swennen says, “is revolution, not evolution.”

For Swennen and his colleagues, that's a good thing. But for groups against the genetic modification of food—including well-known environmental organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth—the idea of speeding up, or even replacing, natural processes that have evolved over thousands of years seems like a very bad idea. Lab-made products are often referred to in the media, and by these groups, as “Frankenfoods.” Those using the term typically accompany it with a curdling litany of what sound like edible monstrosities: “Potatoes with bacteria genes, ‘super' pigs with human growth genes, fish with cattle growth genes, tomatoes with flounder genes, and thousands of other plants, animals and insects,” according to a report from the Center for Food Safety, a Washington DC–based advocacy group. The risks of those products, the group argues, extend to “humans, domesticated animals, wildlife and the environment. Human health effects can include higher risks of toxicity, allergenicity, antibiotic resistance, immune-suppression and cancer. As for environmental impacts, the use of genetic engineering in agriculture will lead to uncontrolled biological pollution, threatening numerous microbial, plant and animal species with extinction, and the potential contamination of all non–genetically engineered life forms with novel and possibly hazardous genetic material.”

That's scary. But it is also overblown, according to James K. M. Brown of Britain's John Innes Centre, an independent research center specializing in plant science and microbiology. “There is no good evidence that, in itself, GM technology harms the safety of food,” Brown says. Some of the issues cited by anti-GM forces are clearly bogus: The use of bacteria, for example, is not inherently dangerous—bacteria are found everywhere; they're a natural and desired part of yogurt, for example, and adding them to products ranging from soft drinks to candy bars is currently a trendy way to get consumers to spend more money in the supermarket (those products are usually described as “probiotic”). The claim that more people might be allergic to genetically modified foods comes from a study of soybeans crossed with Brazil nuts. The resulting soybeans did exhibit signs of allergenicity, but that wasn't a surprise, since many people already have an allergic reaction to Brazil nuts (in fact, says Brown, this is a
good
result, because it “implies that other proteins…such as oral vaccines, should also retain their useful properties when expressed in different plants”).

The current distribution—and regulation—of biotech crops around the world is mixed. The United States is the world's most GMO-loaded country. The 123 million acres of transformed crops we grow each year is more than the quantity produced by every other country on earth combined. We also eat more biotech food than anywhere else. Some estimates claim that more than half of the processed foods we consume contain GMO ingredients. One of the reasons our food supply is so laden with such products is that development of them is encouraged by the government, and food labels here, unlike in most of the industrialized world, aren't required to reveal whether, or what, GMO ingredients the product contains (food manufacturers are, however, required to disclose whether or not allergens are contained in their products, which is why you see peanut warnings on everything from loaves of bread to ice cream).

In Europe the situation is reversed. Though limited development of biotech crops is allowed—researchers have to follow a rigorous permitting and monitoring process—the sale of such foods is almost completely banned. If a GM product is sold, it has to be labeled as such, which tends to make shoppers run away. That bodes poorly for engineered bananas. In 2000, Fyffes—the former United Fruit subsidiary that is one of Europe's biggest banana importers—surveyed British shoppers, asking if they'd be willing to purchase GM bananas: 82 percent of the respondents said they absolutely wouldn't. Del Monte has said it will never market transformed bananas; Chiquita and Dole have been less committal, but so far they've pledged that nothing on the market is currently modified. It is unlikely that a major banana company would undertake production of a GM fruit if most of the world's consumers would refuse, or even be unable, to accept them (yet another criteria added to the long list of things that
don't
make a commercial banana viable).

That's why researchers like Swennen and Remy also find it nearly impossible to conduct field tests on their experimental plants. Many countries ban them completely. “For a scientist,” says Remy, “that's hell.” Until recently, there was no place on earth to test engineered bananas outside of greenhouses and laboratories. Halfway through 2007, Ugandan researchers announced that they'd accepted engineered Belgian bananas and were allowing a small test plantation—just a few acres—to be established outside Kampala. There were different opinions on how Ugandans might react to the project. “People have more pressing concerns, like the rebellion in the north, AIDS, droughts and poverty,” Richard Markham, director of the Commodities for Livelihoods program at Bioversity International (formerly INIBAP), told
Nature
magazine. But Godber Tumushabe, of Uganda's Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment, was quoted in the same article as saying that there is debate over biotech in his country. Though it has “died down in recent years,” he says, “when field trials begin, it could start again.” (Swennen, for his part, couldn't have been happier; he sent me an excited e-mail immediately after his permissions came through: “YESTERDAY!!!” he wrote, “we shipped the first transgenic plants to Uganda!”)

Despite skepticism, the use of biotech crops has been growing steadily, more than tripling in both developing and industrialized nations since 2000. That increase has led to the development of an international standard that regulates the use and production of genetically modified foods. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety requires producers of genetically modified foods to accurately label their output while adopting “precautionary” measures in research, growing, and transport. Every crop-growing European nation has signed or ratified the agreement. In the Americas, the only countries that are not protocol signatories are Bolivia—and the United States.

Those opposed to biotechnology point out that the U.S. Congress has never adopted any form of legislation related to GM foods, arguing that, in fact, they're beholden to special interests, much as parts of the U.S. government were linked to banana companies through the 1950s. The lack of any sort of labeling requirements seems—even to those in favor of biotech—like good evidence for that charge.

Yet the villains opponents usually point to, like companies that develop proprietary seeds, which lock farms into a sort of agribusiness indenture (the seeds are designed to produce plants with limited reproductive cycles, forcing farmers to repurchase growing materials each season) don't exist in the banana world, where research is mostly conducted by publicly funded institutions and is aimed at hunger relief rather than commercial interests. Scientists working on the banana genome have signed agreements that any transformed fruit derived from their work must remain in the public domain, which would eliminate the “lock-in” effect of proprietary crops.

Bananas are also likely not subject to the “genie from the bottle” issue that biotech opponents cite—the idea that releasing modified foods into the environment will allow bizarre mutations to escape into the wild, having potentially devastating effects on health and the environment. That's virtually impossible with bananas, for the same reason reengineering the fruit is so difficult: Bananas are sterile. A banana engineered for human consumption would, by definition, contain no seeds or pollen. The means by which a stray crop could escape into the wild and contaminate traditional crops (this has happened with corn in many parts of the world, with the local crops becoming so hybridized that it becomes impossible to determine their true provenance) don't exist in bananas. It is difficult to see how the returns yielded by modified bananas couldn't far outweigh either their real or speculative risks, especially in Africa.

“The bottom line,” says Swennen, “is that bananas need biotechnology.” That's especially true for the Cavendish. “I don't see any other way to save it.”

Far from any point at which the results of these breeding experiments could be determined—and absent all but the most limited trials to hasten those findings—the banana, this weak, essential food, is in danger of fading away. Already, banana production in some parts of Africa is down by more than 60 percent, thanks to Black Sigatoka, Panama disease, and a dozen other major banana maladies. Swennen is not reserved in his opinions. He explains that it was the spread of Sigatoka in Nigeria, and the frustration he faced as a conventional breeder, that finally convinced him that his best chance was in the lab. Those who oppose the attempt to engineer a better banana, he says, are against something that would—that has to—protect millions of people. On a winter day in Belgium, a dozen meters from the greenhouse that is the only place in the world where many of these strengthened bananas are allowed to grow, Swennen spoke two words, forcefully, for the people who didn't understand what was at stake, then repeated them to make sure I'd understood.

“They're wrong,” he said. “They're wrong.”