Banana (24 page)

WHAT IF AMERICA GIVES UP BANANAS?
The beloved fruit, as we consume it, isn't practical. It never has been. There has always been a cost to the fruit's south-to-north trade, one that we, as shoppers, have never borne. The best solution for most of the social ills caused by the industrialization of food production is to give up the exotics—beef from Australia, mangoes from Malaysia, fish from China—that, like bananas, require huge infrastructures and rock-bottom operating costs to remain economical. We could grow and buy locally and only eat fruit in season, only eat meat raised and killed with humane practices. Our market baskets could be filled with items from small-scale concerns, purchased at local markets.

I don't wish to be cynical: This is an idea I believe in. But, again, to make it happen would require vast changes in public opinion, in the way business operates, and in the way government regulates companies. Bananas wouldn't make the cut in such a system, since they can't be grown locally for U.S. shoppers. It would be a sad day for anyone who relies on the fruit as an energy boost on the way to the gym or savors its fresh, creamy taste in breakfast cereal, smoothies, or ice cream. I'd miss the wonderful banana pancakes available at a diner just a five minute walk from my home in Los Angeles, which have started my day for nearly the entire length of this project (the sight of a slightly glazed-looking fellow, poring over a ream of banana-related papers, stories, and notes, is finally considered normal at that spot). Yet, as much as we love these things, the loss, I think, would be worth it.

If we intend to keep bananas, maybe the answer is a Cavendish replacement—a third generation in the history of our favorite fruit. That has happened in Cuba and Brazil. The Caribbean island nation uses FHIA varieties; Brazil grows its more tart, more resistant banana. But neither of these bananas is easy to ship. Both of them taste, and look, strange to Americans: The Cuban fruit is greener and less sweet; the Brazilian banana is applelike in texture. The banana is a natural product, but conventional wisdom stills says that changing it would be as ill-advised as creating a new formula for Coca-Cola.

I say nonsense. The Cavendish naysayers were wrong in the 1950s, and similar arguments are wrong today. My nomination for a new banana is Lacatan. Of all the fruit types I tasted, the Philippine variety is, by far, my favorite. Lacatan has been grown successfully in the Caribbean. Lacatan was tried, in the 1920s, as a stand-in for Gros Michel. Nobody denied that it was delicious—tasty enough, perhaps, to overcome the fact that it is more red than yellow. But the variety is fragile. If you do find a bunch at your local natural foods market, you will notice immediately how bruised and, perhaps, mushy they are. Delicious as you now know the Lacatan to be, you might pass it by. Still, the banana industry managed to invent technologies to overcome the drawbacks of the Cavendish. I don't know if the same thing could be accomplished for the Lacatan, but I know that nobody has seriously tried.

DOES THE BANANA HAVE TIME ON ITS SIDE?
Many would argue that the answer is yes. But that's thinking only about the Cavendish. There may be five or ten or thirty years left for our banana. Maybe Panama disease won't continue to spread so quickly. Maybe the Cavendish can be inoculated. Maybe we'll find a way to convert over to Lacatan.

That's not the issue.

As you now know, the Cavendish is not the only banana an ocean-jumping epidemic could affect. Here, an outbreak of banana disease affects our breakfast tables. In South and Central America, the spread of the malady threatens to make already-poor economic conditions worse. In India it means a loss of biodiversity; in the Pacific it means the diminishment of an important locally grown foodstuff in favor of expensive imports.

But it is Africa where the cause is most urgent. And cultural shifts are making the outcome of a fast-moving banana epidemic potentially more tragic. Village life is changing. As in nineteenth-century Europe and America, as in Asia over the past three decades, Africans are moving closer to cities. In many cases, they may not be able to take their village fruit along. Instead, they'll need to buy bananas at market, just as we do. Urban bananas, whether in New York or Kinshasa, require upheavals in production. A disease that spreads from a few garden plots in one African village to another can be contained. But when Africans move to cities and want their
matoke
, they have to get their bananas from bigger and bigger farms: plantations, newly built, where diseases spread quickly, radiating outward from town to town, country to country, across a continent—and beyond.

An epidemic in the Cavendish—the global banana—could become an epidemic in the dozens of bananas human beings depend on locally and in the hundreds of bananas needed to maintain the diversity vital to fighting such an epidemic.

The circularity of it is depressing.

BUT REALLY,
is all this doom and gloom likely? Isn't the Cavendish well isolated on its own plantations? For now, maybe. But the mechanism that could change that is now falling into place.

Disease is what forced banana companies to flee from country to country during the Gros Michel era. Today, that movement is stoked by economics and politics.

The world's trade wars centered around bananas are having an unintended effect. While Europe attempts to promote the interests of small growers by favoring their product over fruit produced farther away, the big banana companies are moving operations to the countries that Europeans can buy bananas from. In early 2007, Chiquita announced that it was closing some plantations in Central America and moving them to the former French colony of Ivory Coast, in Africa. Bananas from there don't violate EU rules. Cavendish plantations are expanding across the rest of the continent.

The hunt for land has been renewed. And the banana moguls face the same issue they did a century ago. They need to make an impossible fruit cheap enough to buy but costly enough to be profitable. If Europe wants bananas, Chiquita must grow them in Africa. If Japan wants bananas, they'll be grown in the Philippines. Or Ecuador. Or India. Or Southeast Asia, as they were two decades ago, when a package of dirt arrived at a Florida scientist's door.

The banana race is on again: Dole, Chiquita, Del Monte, Great Britain's Fyffes, Ecuador's Bonita, and a half-dozen other companies based around the world are battling to become a favorite not just on the breakfast tables of Europe and America, but everywhere.

As bananas move to new soil, they—just as the Cavendish did in Malaysia and Sumatra—encounter new, virulent organisms. In 2001 a grower of beer bananas in the tiny Ugandan village of Bulyanti began to observe strange symptoms in freshly planted fruit. Buds were shriveling; fruit was ripening early and unevenly, with some bananas turning yellow, others staying green. When the bananas were cut open, they were purple instead of the usual yellowish white. The fruit quickly rotted and couldn't be eaten by humans or even livestock.

By the time agricultural inspectors arrived in Bulyanti, the malady had spread to the entire village. Then the region. The blight was at least as potent as Bunchy Top or Sigatoka. Within three years, the outbreak had grown into a full-blown epidemic, forming a circle whose diameter was constantly expanding, from ten, to twenty, to—today—thirty-two of Uganda's fifty-four districts.

The likely cause of the outbreaks has little to do with felling rain forest or mass contamination of huge plantations or the replanting of infected plants in clean soil. What has come to be known as “banana
Xanthomonas
wilt” (BXW) spreads, as Panama disease does in China, via people: through water, on vehicles, even in canoes bringing fruit from village to village.

The speed at which BXW traveled was especially disturbing. In 2004 the disease was reported outside Uganda: first in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, and then in Rwanda. In 2006 it was seen in Tanzania. There is little doubt that it will keep moving, keep destroying.

BXW is a threat to the world's bananas all by itself. As with Panama disease, there is no cure available. Work on breeding resistant bananas has barely begun.

Scary enough. But the spread of BXW may also contain a prediction: When Panama disease arrives on our side of the world, it will likely move just as fast. The currency of Africa's latest crisis may be different, but the equation is the same as in our hemisphere: Save the banana—or watch it perish, and suffer the consequences.

THE SEARCH FOR ANSWERS
has quickened in the past few years. Funds are beginning to flow to banana scientists, who have long since been at the far end of the receiving line compared to their counterparts working in wheat, rice, and corn.

In 2004 scientists in Taiwan reported success in developing a modified Cavendish that successfully resisted Panama disease (ultimately, that moment of promise ran aground when the fruit that grew well in Taiwanese soil failed to yield similar results at other plantations). An Israeli biotech company announced that it had made progress toward engineering a resistant version of the commercial fruit. And for the first time in decades, the world's biggest banana company has joined the search. Just three years ago, a Chiquita spokesperson scoffed when asked whether the company was trying to build a better banana. “That's not a productive avenue,” he said. “We prefer to focus our research on traditional means of control.” Pesticides over patrimony. But in 2005, the company returned to La Lima. It set up a private conventional breeding project at FHIA, in the labs and greenhouses it built five decades ago and abandoned in the 1980s. The Honduran researchers are operating under a strict gag order. So far, no miracle banana has been announced, but the world is waking up to the threats today's blights pose.

IF ONLY THE AVAILABLE SOLUTIONS WORKED
.
If only disease-free bananas stayed disease free. If only the breeding efforts undertaken over the past eighty years could somehow not reach dead ends. If only it was practical to sell and eat multiple varieties of fruit, grown in multiple places, the way we eat apples.

Maybe there will be some kind of breakthrough. Maybe it will happen.

But I don't think so.

But I also don't believe the outlook is bleak.

There is a way to build a better banana fast—fast enough that it may actually make a difference.

That way is Rony Swennen's way.

Like you, probably, and like many people, I began this project with a vague and uneasy suspicion of “genetic manipulation.” Such foods, I believed, were created to increase corporate profits and not necessarily public health.

But I'm not talking about cloned beef or tomatoes that stay unnaturally “fresh” for weeks on end. This is about bananas. This is a crop in which every one is like every other. That means that once a healthy, safe banana comes out of the lab, it is not likely to change. We'd know how this banana will taste and grow and ship and survive. What we should also know is who it would help.

For a hundred years, we have allowed whatever risk there is in bananas to be borne elsewhere: in the town squares of Colombia, along railroad lines in Costa Rica, by the blue-skinned sprayers of Bordeaux mixture in Guatemala. We have thought only about a single banana, the only one we eat, and rarely about the ones people eat
only
. It seems to me that if we allow others to suffer the problems that arise from growing and depending on bananas, and we refuse to shoulder even a portion of that load, then we're doing nothing but continuing a century of disregard and exploitation that began with the first shipment of Gros Michel fruit aboard a sail-driven schooner.

It would be hard to build a banana that resisted everything. But even coming close could change the world. The lab-made banana could be clean. It could be grown without pesticides. It could be grown organically. It could be grown—because it is stronger, and because stronger means cheaper—according to fair-trade principles. It could be the banana that finally reverses history, that finally makes each bunch a guilt-free choice, even a redeeming one, as we load them into our shopping carts, as we argue over who first sliced them into ice cream, as we sing ridiculous songs about them.

That banana—and only that banana—could, quite possibly, be the world's most perfect fruit.