Monocropping once again is proving to be a risky venture in my not-so-humble opinion. It looks like bananas are once again at risk of Panama disease. š¦
I’ve done some reading and apparently back before the 1950’s the world’s favourite banana was the Gros Michel.
Big Mike
Not to be confused with Magic Mike.
The Gros Michel cultivar of banana was the main banana crop before the 1950’s. That’s before Panama disease wiped out almost every Gros Michel banana plant in the world. Only Thailand was spared. Dwarf Cavendish was brought in to replace the Gros Michel as it is resistant to Panama disease. Or at least to the strain that wiped out Gros Michel. Since Panama disease can spread very easily and lives in the soil for up to 30 years it at least meant that banana farmers could continue to grow bananas in the same infected soil where Gros Michel couldn’t grow but… Well, it looks like Panama disease has come back to haunt banana farmers once again. And this time there is no resistant cultivar with which to replace them.
The standard supermarket banana that you likely find almost anywhere in the world.
Dwarf Cavendish bananas are susceptible to Panama disease, a strain called Tropical Race 4 (TR4) and it appears that TR4 is on the spread. š¦ TR4 is Ā in Australia under strict quarantine in Darwin and also in Queensland as of early 2014 from what I can gather although how long it stays contained is anybody’s guess. If I have learned anything from my garden it is that nature controls us, not us controlling it. For further information, check this link.
Scientists are doing what scientists do and are working hard to find or breed resistant cultivars. One of the problems with bananas is that they are all clones. Commercial bananas don’t have seeds (the wild ones do) so they are replanted from slips or other forms of cloned seedling. It means they are all the same and all just as susceptible as their neighbours to this devastating disease. Some scientists are trying to create a new breed with cross-pollination but bananas aren’t really suited to this in general so they’re having low success (still, some is better than one I guess) whereas others are frankensteining the banana with genes from all sorts of frightening sources. Check out this paragraph from the Wikipedia page on Panama disease.
Scientists are trying to modify the banana plant to make it resist Panama disease and many other serious banana afflictions ranging from fungal,Ā bacterial, andĀ viralĀ infections to burrowing worms andĀ beetles. Researchers are combing remote jungles searching for new wild bananas.Ā HybridĀ bananas are being created in the hope of generating a new variety with strong resistance to diseases.Ā Genetic engineersĀ are addingĀ genesĀ from altogether different fruits, vegetables, and even fish. Some believe the best hope for a more resilient banana is through genetic engineering. However, the resulting fruit also need to taste good, ripen in the correct amount of time, travel long distances undamaged, and be easy to grow in great quantities. Currently, no banana meets all of these requirements.
I don’t know about you but I’m not particularly interested in eating a banana with fish genes, are you? š¦ Once again, we humans are playing god to produce the perfect banana. Good taste, good green pick/transportable-ness, long shelf life, easy to monocrop and no seeds so that the general public will not have to adapt their banana habits in any noticeable way.
Not appealing.
In my reading and research on bananas and Panama disease I came across lots of very interesting banana cultivars of which I’ve never heard. Bananas of different shapes and colours. Plantains (starchier bananas better eaten cooked) to small red bananas, false bananas that were a major crop in Africa and all sorts. I’m not a fan of bananas personally and our town’s one and only supermarket caters for the basic fruits and veggies so I wouldn’t anticipate seeing some exotic variety on their shelves anyway but have you ever heard of or better yet seen and eaten a red banana? If so, tell me all about it please! I’d love to know how they taste.
I found a spectacularĀ picture and post about red bananas hereĀ if you’re interested. š
We may yet lose the banana from our supermarket shelves. Not this year, maybe not next but unless a resistant cultivar is bred or created by GM, eventually the TR4 will break containment. Nature does that. She won’t be bound by our rules or our walls. My little banana in my greenhouse has justĀ become so much more than a fun to grow experiment and goal to self-sufficiency. I will only ever be able to clone it via pups growing from the mother plant but even so, if I can keep it warm and alive and get it to reach fruition (there’s a lot of if’s in that idea I can tell you)I will at least be able to give my kids bananas in years to come which seems to no longer be a certainty.
Will we learn the lesson from this Cavendish disaster waiting to happen? I doubt it. We didn’t learn from the Gros Michel disaster, instead we repeated exactly the same mistakes as first time around, simply replacing the Gros Michel with the Dwarf Cavendish. I believe we should allĀ take note though and do our best to grow varieties of any given species whenever and wherever we can. If you have room for more than a single cultivar then plant 2 or more. I will continue to grow my tiny seed grown apples and see how they go over time. Maybe I won’t grow an apple considered to be commercially viable but maybe I will grow an apple that is tasty, crisp and juicy and suited to my very own local climate conditions (late frosts and very dry summers with hard bake clay soil). It’s well worth trying though in my opinion. š
A wild banana with seeds. Not quite so much flesh for eating but I do wonder how they taste.
Rabid Little Hippy 
I think I saw a little spiel on Gardening Australia about this disease and how they are asking QLD backyard growers not to ever swap plants or cuttings due to the spreading factor. I definitely would not like a banana to taste anything remotely fish like!
This has created quite the discussion in our house. My husband is a horticulturist and has experience with plant diseases and he is quite alarmed at the potential for catastrophe in this situation. At this moment he is doing research on his computer about it š
In his searching he has found that it also impacts on ornamental gingers which means that there is the possibility it could also impact on the edible varieties at some point too.
You are absolutely correct that we should be looking for varieties suited to our particular climate and lets face it with peak oil there will come a time that it if doesnt grow nearby we arent going to be able to afford to buy it anyway, even if it is available.
If consumers werent so hell bent on being able to buy fruit etc out of season ( or the goverment more interested in their political alliances) then as an island nation we should be able to protect ourselves from these issues.
A complex issue for sure…
Plants grow in seasons for a reason and, with careful planning there is a food for every time of the year. In the northern hemisphere I believe Lent falls at the time of year when food is scarcest which also makes sense that it’s a time for restraint when food is scant.
Learning to eat seasonably is hard but our ancestors at this way and indeed even our very recent ancestors did. It’s only the last 2 or 3 generations that have been able to eat apples 12 months of the year.
Peak oil will come too late to save the Cavendish banana I fear. š¦ And yes, there are other strains of Fusarium that affect solanaceae, melons and all sorts. It’s pretty wide spread from what I read but I guess it is what it is. Permaculture principles work in our favour with containing these types of diseases though. š Here’s hoping that bananas aren’t doomed to the way of the Dodo. š¦
Great post š
Those red bananas look so nice. I wonder why we don’t see them here.
I always thought we’d lose bananas here in Victoria because of the energy depletion issue. I couldn’t see them coming down from Qld via horse and cart, which is what it would amount to. So maybe the banana will go extinct. It might wake up a few of the brain-dead as to what extinction is all about.
No we never learn. The people who keep banging on about nuclear power replacing fossil fuels just don’t see that replacing one finite, non-renewable energy source with another finite, non-renewable energy source isn’t a particularly bright thing to do. Not if you care about your childrens and grandchildren’s future that is.
Postponing a problem isn’t the way to deal with it.
Thanks FnS.
Nuclear power requires a lot of fossil fuels to mine, transport and then contain the used uranium or whatever it is too from the tiny bit I understand about the nuclear issue. Not a good replacement there at all. š¦
I too figured we’d lose bananas but never thought the whole world might. It was very interesting reading if not exactly happy. The idea of losing bananas for ever post peak oil was what prompted me to try and grow one in the first place. š Have you a banana growing in your food forest?
RED BANANAS – I love red bananas. I am lucky enough to spend some time volunteering in East TImor and they have quite a few varieties of bananas. But my favourite, and everybody else’s to judge by the prices, is definitely the red banana. Although there is a small greenish one that is very sweet that is not too bad either. I had a Malaysian friend who gave me a bananas plant in Melbourne from his Mother’s garden (also in Melbourne) Mine sadly died before it produced anything, but his mothers plants produce small sweet bananas on occasion but they have to protect them from the cold winds and frost.
Oooo if it wasn’t highly illegal and intensely risky for country and for you, I would beg you to smuggle me in a red banana cutting or 3. I guess I’ll either need to take a holiday or just imagine them. What do they taste like and tellme all the differences. I may not like eating bananas but I would sample them all to find out the differences and those red ones look amazing!
My first banana froze solid when it reached -4 inside the greenhouse but this year so far my lady finger is doing well. It’s much bigger for starters, there’s a rotting straw bale next to it and 2 20L buckets of water, one on each side, to help with thermal mass. There are also 2 other 500L black drums in there helping out with that too. My tomatoes are thriving, my taro are shooting and I am hoping I can keep it alive all winter long.
What an interesting little banana? Looks more like a banana passionfruit than a regular banana doesn’t it? But that’s the “real” banana and maybe we need to get used to that? Maybe nature is stamping her foot and saying “I am SO over hybrids!”
Nature is a smart cookie and has the last decision. I think we humans would do well to relearn our place in this world and at the end of the day if Gaia decides to shrug us off she can and will. I hope she just sticks to wiping out hybrids though.
Me too. I would rather suck the seeds out of bananas than have to learn to live with a 10C increase in global temperature…
Amen sister!
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