האירבה תואלפנ...Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the...
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Transcript of האירבה תואלפנ...Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the...
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The Miracle of the Modern Banana Explore the dark and dangerous ways the banana became
the world's dominant fruit and why its future is at risk..
By Daniel Stone
When it comes to fruit, I have a pet peeve. When people talk about fruit at cocktail
parties, my only quibble is something semantic: how people use the word “the"—as in,
when the strawberry arrived in North America, or how the avocado is paralyzing
Central American farmers. There is no single version of each fruit any more than there
is a single shade of red. To say that there is washes over the richness of fruit’s
diversity. (Usually by this point, I find myself standing alone watching the ice melt in
my drink.)
And yet, there is one fruit that deserves the “the” moniker, because it’s a fruit like
none other. It's the world's most consumed fruit and spans generations as food for
both toothless babies and the toothless geriatric. It's soft, sweet, and easy to digest.
It crosses historical eras, has been responsible for entire governments rising and
falling, and has propped up beleaguered economies. If fruits were countries, the
banana would be the world's superpower. If fruits were pop stars, the banana
would be Beyoncé. V I E W I M A G E S
Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World,
explains how the banana found this unlikely stardom. He calls the fruit “one of the
most intriguing organisms on earth” for a host of reasons. The banana’s parent
plant isn’t a tree but an herb, and the fruit itself is a berry. The trajectory of
bananas is a story of immigration, from obscure jungle species in Southeast Asia to
the largest fruit crop and the fourth-most valuable food crop in the world, behind
only wheat, rice, and milk.
In a globalized way, there is only one banana. There were once thousands of
varieties—fuzzy ones, striped ones, ones that tasted like strawberries. And in some
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parts of the world, there still are. But the story of the banana is the story of how
humans hyper-optimized food production. More than any other industrialized food
like beef, eggs, or bread, the modern banana is a miracle of biology, and because of
this, an incredible biological risk.
Of the thousands of bananas that have grown on Earth, the only one with truly
global reach is called the Cavendish, which is neither the king nor queen of
bananas. To most of the world it is simply the banana, cloned so many times that a
banana you buy in Rome is identical as one in Rochester. This would be exciting
news to Duke William George Spencer Cavendish, who first propagated the plant in
1834 and gave it his name.
The U.S. eats 3 million tons of bananas each year—a stunningly large number for a
country that produces very few. They're the single-most sold item at Walmart, to
the tune of 1 billion pounds annually. This despite the fact that on the list of
banana producers, the U.S. ranks number 92, behind Samoa, Kiribati, and French
Guyana, and produces less than one-hundredth of one percent of the world’s total.
Global dominance, combined with a strong consumer market, masks the fact that bananas are at risk, and not just in the sense of long-in-the-future climate change. “There’s a global banana crisis,” CNN reported in large block letters crawling across the TV screen earlier this year. The BBC declared the Cavendish at risk of “imminent death.” That’s because of Panama disease, a suffocating root fungus from Taiwan. Since all Cavendishes are clones, if the fungus can kill one banana shrub, it can kill them all.
Panama Disease isn’t new. It’s been around since the 1950s, when it wiped out the
Cavendish’s predecessor, known as the Gros Michel, or Big Mike. When the Gros
Michel banana succumbed to the fungus, the Cavendish was found to be immune,
at least until the fungus mutated and started its attack all over again. Starting in
the 1990s, the Panama fungus began to work its way across Asia and Africa again,
this time taking aim at the Cavendish. The only thing protecting South American
growers from the fungus are the two oceans surrounding it. But when someone
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with the fungus on their shoe can cross an ocean in a few hours, oceans provide
little protection..
In spite of everything conspiring against them, and also, in some ways, because of
it, bananas are a miracle. There’s hardiness in their pedigree, a stubbornness that
shouldn’t be eclipsed by something as measly as a fungus. The irony is that the
bananas we eat today need humans to multiply. They couldn't exist on their own.
Although considering how central they’ve been to so many people through history,
I sometimes wonder which species needs the other more.
Why Are Bananas So Cheap? The United States overthrew the government of a sovereign
country in the 1950s. That’s one reason.
In the U.S., the country that consumes three million tons of bananas each year and
produces almost none of them, bananas are incredibly cheap—usually less than 89
cents per pound, or in some supermarkets, just 19 cents apiece. That’s for fruit
grown thousands of miles away and transported in ships and trucks across oceans,
highways, and national borders to get to your door. In fact, cheap barely captures
it. For Americans, bananas are practically free.
There’s a historic reason for this, and one that’s rarely seen in matters of pomology
(a.k.a. the science of growing fruit.) The normal way is to line up easy growing
conditions, cheap shipping costs, and consumer interest; and you get popular,
powerhouse fruits like apples and oranges.
Yet bananas are different. Banana popularity is a synthetic alloy, the product of 150
years of engineering by governments, corporations, and militaries to fuel abundant
production and ever-increasing demand.
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The first time many Americans tasted a banana was at the 1876 Centennial
International Exhibition in Philadelphia, more popularly known as the World’s
Fair. The U.S. was a full century old that year, and to celebrate, two new
innovations foreshadowed dramatic change. One was the telephone brought by
young Alexander Graham Bell, and the other was a banana. The edible novelty—
from the tropics!—came wrapped in foil, for the sky high price of 10 cents each,
about two dollars today.
Eating a tropical fruit in Philadelphia opened people’s minds to a future of
shrinking oceans and a more globalized world. And that early excitement resulted
in so much demand that by 1885, the Boston Fruit Company started buying up land
in Central America to grow bananas. American fruit companies offered these Latin
American governments outside money and the prospect of thousands of jobs, plus
money for things like roads and fertilizers. Not everyone loved the arrangement,
but for government leaders, it wasn’t just hard to turn the deals down—it was
practically impossible.
If this sounds like thinly veiled exploitation, it was. And it only increased. As
banana demand ballooned, so did profit. The 1907 edition of the Fruit Trade
Journal called the U.S. setup in Central America, “an occupation…with ironclad
certainty for immense returns of wealth.” That year, American bananas were a $60
million business and growing. Meanwhile, the laborers tasked with managing this
demand saw their wages stay low, far below the average American salary at the
time, which was $438.
This model persisted for another 50 years, through two world wars. Governments
came and fell, but no Central American leader could shake the grip of the American
banana industry. At times, United Fruit effectively took over government duties in
Guatemala and Honduras, leading to both countries being known as “banana
republics,” their primary purpose to ensure a steady supply of fruit.
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By 1950, more than half of Guatemala’s economy depended on growing and
transporting bananas. And anyone standing in the way would experience the blunt
force of the Banana Industrial Complex. That complex was led by United Fruit,
which owned four million acres (almost three quarters) of Guatemala’s arable land.
Perhaps no one knew this better than Jacobo Árbenz, the man whose life and
career would be defined by resistance to Big Banana. Árbenz, just 38, campaigned
for the presidency of Guatemala in 1951 on a socialistic platform for returning
Guatemala's land to its people. He wanted to charge United Fruit the full cost of its
operations in the country by collecting fair taxes and guaranteeing fair wages for
workers. But as Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer show in Bitter Fruit: The
Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, this was the dawn of the Cold War between
the Soviets and the Americans, and beleaguered Central America countries stood
little chance of making their own sovereign choices.
In June of 1954, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower approved a coup, led by the
Central Intelligence Agency, to drive Árbenz out of power. It was subtle and
designed to be secret: Almost $3 million was allotted for the operation, and the
largest expenditure was for "psychological warfare and political action” designed to
limit detection of American fingerprints. CIA director Allen Dulles wrote in a
memo to President Eisenhower that, “The entire effort is…more dependent upon
psychological impact rather than actual military strength.”
The gambit worked, and when the coup ended, the CIA installed a new president
sympathetic to American interests. Árbenz was taken to the airport, stripped to his
underwear, paraded before cameras, and exiled to Mexico. The fight with the
United States that had cost him his dignity was over taxes, land, and wages. But at
its core, it was about bananas.
Árbenz spent the next few decades wandering around Mexico, Switzerland and
France. Meanwhile, Guatemala, stripped of its leader, its dignity, and its national
ambition, descended into civil war. The conflict lasted 36 years. The ouster of
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Árbenz and the resulting chaos kept United Fruit (which later became Chiquita) in
control. It kept bananas plentiful, allowed supply to exceed demand, and kept the
price for American consumers only marginally above zero.
Whether any of this should be relevant when you buy a banana for practically
nothing is a question of the ethics of neocolonialism and the politics of
exploitation. No American president has ever publicly reckoned with the cheap
price of bananas and the long-ago decisions that allow them to remain so.
President Bill Clinton came the closest in 1999 when he visited Guatemala, almost
50 years after his country toppled the democratically elected leader of a sovereign
nation. America "engaged in violence and widespread repression," he said. “The
United States must not repeat that mistake.”
One mistake tends to beget more of them, and while the U.S. government was busy
building its banana empire in Central America, U.S. banana companies were
making a faulty bet of their own: this time about biology. The decision to focus on
just one banana variety, cloned millions of times, would leave not only banana
farms, but the entire banana growing complex, at risk of disease. If an insect or
fungus was strong enough to kill one banana tree, then little could stop it from
killing them all.
Imagining the Banana of the Future Bananas are under attack. To keep eating them, you'll need
to keep an open mind.
By Daniel Stone
The banana has conquered land. It has conquered governments. But so far, it
hasn’t been able to conquer its own biological limitations. And nowhere was this
more apparent than—of all places—at the 2016 International Banana Congress.
Every few years, banana experts worldwide gather in one place to share
information about their crop. This year, CORBANA, a Costa
Rican association of banana experts, had arranged to host the meeting in San
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José, Costa Rica, the capital city of one of the most productive banana-
growing countries on Earth. The location seemed to be the perfect place to
assemble banana experts to discuss the crisis facing world banana crops, a
fungal disease known as Fusarium wilt, or Panama Disease, which has been
choking banana plantations for decades.
But several weeks before the scheduled April 2016 conference, it occurred to
CORBANA officials that Costa Rica might actually be the worst place to host
all of the world’s growers: People who attend the conference often come
from all over the world, including the places where the disease has already
taken hold. Visitors could bring in that terrifying fungus on their shoes, or in
samples of fruit or field material.
That risk was deemed unacceptable, so at the last minute, CORBANA moved
the meeting to Miami. “It was very surprising,” says Randy Ploetz, a
University of Florida plant pathologist. “I think it reflected how nervous
these people were.”
V I E W I M A G E S By “these people,” he means the banana growers of Central and South America, longtime banana giants who are now increasingly frightened by the fungus that could demolish their entire industry; and along with it, a huge slice of their countries’ economies.
Bananas are unlike almost all other fruits in that there’s only one variety, the
Cavendish, available in every supermarket (see The Miracle of the Modern
Banana.) Producing identical bananas requires they be cloned, and cloning
gives every tree the same immune system. A disease that can take out one
banana tree can realistically take out all of them.
The latest strain of Panama Disease isn’t new, but its spread has quickened
in recent years. Since the 1990s, it spread across most of Eastern Asia, then
to Africa, and then Europe. Considering North America has an unsuitable
climate to produce bananas at commercial scale, that left South America as
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the only haven left to grow Cavendish bananas—but not for long. One fruit
researcher I talked to called its arrival in the Western Hemisphere
“inevitable.” Another called the banana industry “a long-term train wreck.”
Trying to limit the spread of biological material from infecting a cloned
species can be like trying to stop a wildfire with a few dozen spray bottles.
Globalization of people and products has led some researchers to think that
Panama disease has probably already arrived in South America. It could take
decades to infect the entire continent, but the first domino in a long series
may have already been toppled.
So far, Panama Disease can’t be stopped. But there is strategy to deal with it.
In the 1960s when an earlier strain of the disease struck Panama, Costa Rica
and Honduras, the countries responded by abandoning their market leader,
the once-popular Gros Michel (a.k.a. Big Mike), in favor of the then-immune
Cavendish. After half a century, some banana growers are hoping the
industry can nimbly transition to a third-generation banana. “Fifty years
later, we have much more technology and tools to overcome this disease,”
says Jorge Sauma, chief executive of CORBANA in Costa Rica.
So what will tomorrow’s bananas look like? It depends who you ask. One
low-hanging strategy is to create a soma clonal variation of the Cavendish—a
hybridized sibling that’s similar to the Cavendish but not identical. It
wouldn’t be entirely immune to Fusarium wilt, but it could keep the industry
afloat.
Another option is a genetically modified banana using emerging CRISPR
gene editing technology to rewrite the Cavendish’s genetic code to resist
specific diseases and pests. Researchers at UC Davis and in the Netherlands
are trying the opposite, as well: studying the genetic code of the fungus to
learn how to stop it.
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And then there’s the third option—the wild card—of stumbling upon an
entirely new banana. In Southeast Asia, where bananas were first
domesticated, this isn’t entirely far-fetched; there are hundreds of banana
varieties, one of which could follow the Cavendish the way the Cavendish
followed the Gros Michel.
Chiquita, the world’s biggest banana producer, has motivations of its own.
For many years, Chiquita was using a “risk-mitigation program,” one official
said, ensuring no outside dirt was introduced into South American
plantations. But after last year, when two Brazilian companies bought the
company, the conglomerate has focused on building itself into an even bigger
global food and distribution company, treating Panama Disease as just one
of many risks to a crop that has grown so big, far-reaching, and valuable.
Chiquita officials didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment about
their biological defense strategy and their company's working conditions
(see Why Are Bananas So Cheap?). But several banana researchers blame the
company for the hyper-commodification of a cloned banana to begin with,
leaving the industry at the mercy of the disease.
The best defense mechanism for future bananas will likely be the same one
most fruits and vegetables already rely on: genetic diversity. “My hope is that
the consumer who buys bananas will be more open-minded about what kind
of banana they'll accept,” says Ploetz. “People are addicted to Cavendish, but
you might think about apples. People's only choice used to be Red Delicious,
but now there are many more.”
That sort of diversification is already happening in many American
supermarkets. Red bananas, green ones, bananas the size of a finger, and the
Cavendish’s genetic relative, the plantain, have begun to creep into produce
departments. None are durable enough to replace the Cavendish, but they do
introduce consumers to variety. The most delectable irony may turn out to
be that persuading growers to produce less popular bananas for the sake of
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genetic diversity could turn out to be the easy part. Convincing people to eat
them usually turns out to be much harder.
Bananapocalypse By Paul Tullis
In a hot, dry field near a place called Humpty Doo in Australia’s Northern Territory,
scientists are racing to begin an experiment that could determine the future of the
world’s most popular fruit, the lowly banana.
Dodging the occasional crocodile, researchers will soon place into the soil thousands of
small plants that they hope will produce standard Cavendish bananas — the nicely
curved, yellow variety representing 99 percent of all bananas sold in the United States.
But in this case, the plants have been modified with genes from a different banana
variety.
An insidious fungus known as fusarium wilt has wiped out tens of thousands of acres of
Cavendish plantations in Australia and Southeast Asia over the past decade. And the
fungus recently gained a foothold in Africa and the Middle East, hitching a ride on the
boots of workers helping to establish new plantations. Scientists say Latin America, the
source of virtually all the bananas eaten in the United States, is next.
No other variety of banana combines the sweetness and suitability for packing and
export of the Cavendish. If the Humpty Doo experiment — or simultaneous efforts with
conventional breeding techniques — don’t bring positive results, scientist say we could
be looking at a future where bananas all but disappear from store shelves.
“These recent outbreaks confirmed that this thing does move,” said plant pathologist
Randy Ploetz of the University of Florida, who first identified the fungus in 1989 in
samples from Taiwan. Ever since, banana farmers have been trying to escape the effects
of fusarium wilt, also known as Panama disease Tropical Race 4, or TR4. Fungicides and
fumigants are useless against it. It’s extremely contagious, and it can lie dormant for
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decades, tricking farmers into thinking they’ve eliminated the pathogen, only to find
plants rotting from the inside.
Once TR4 hits a banana farm, the only recourse is to eradicate all the plants and start
over. It’s possible, Ploetz said, that in a few years, “affected plantations aren’t going to be
able to grow anything, because the replacement is not there.”
Foiled efforts
For decades, biotech researchers and conventional breeders were foiled in their efforts
to bring disease resistance to the Cavendish or to hybridize a replacement for the thick-
skinned, slow-ripening variety that dominates banana exports, a $12.4 billion global
business.
Soon after TR4 was identified, banana farmers had reported that a subspecies of
the Musa acuminata variety of sweet bananas, which grows in the wild across Malaysia
and Indonesia, was “growing happily in plantations devastated by TR4,” said James
Dale, a professor of biotechnology at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
It took years to isolate the gene responsible for the resistance. Then, in 2004, a
breakthrough: Dale’s lab identified candidate genes worth testing. Over three more
years of painstaking work, Dale inserted genes from the M. acuminata subspecies into
cells from a Cavendish, developing them first in tiny test tubes, then growing whole
plants. It takes about a year to grow a plant with roots that can be placed in the soil.
But despite the clear and present danger of TR4, no one wanted to pay for a field trial;
banana producers mistakenly believed they could manage the disease and keep it in
check. So it was another three or four years before Dale could cobble together funding
and find a facility where he could grow the plants to produce transgenic bananas. He
was able to plant a small field trial in 2012, which lasted three years.
Results from that initial trial “were extremely positive,” he said, with four of six plant
lines cultivated from a single cell showing resistance after researchers grew them and
introduced TR4. “When you genetically modify a plant, it’s very common to get such
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variation, but four out of six is amazing.” On the basis of that initial trial, Dale and his
colleagues will be expanding the test to thousands of samples, planting them over three
years.
Near extinction
Dale’s project may be the best hope science now has for making the Cavendish resistant
to TR4 without eliminating taste, texture and other characteristics that make it so
appealing and commercially successful.
Botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and agricultural research organizations
from France to Honduras to Malaysia are collecting samples of wild bananas to see
whether, like Dale’s M. acuminata variety, they possess resistance to TR4. Those that do
are then bred with Cavendish with the hope that the resistance can be introduced to the
Cavendish without changing it.
Ploetz is optimistic about Dale’s trial, but he’s not peeling his bananas before they’re
ripe. He thinks Dale needs to “to test this new [genetically-modified fruit] in different
environments and see the effects on yield” and other factors, he said.
The banana industry has seen this all before. In the early 20th century, the banana most
commonly sold and eaten around the world was the Gros Michel, a short, uncurved and
somewhat stubby cultivar.
But a fungus known as Tropical Race 1 — or TR1 — drove it nearly to extinction in the
1950s. Cavendish, a variety from China found growing in a hothouse belonging to
England’s Duke of Devonshire, was discovered to be resistant to TR1 while possessing
its same durability for shipping. The ordinary bananas we find in stores today are all
clones of the duke’s plant.
The duke’s banana
Dale initially tried using genes from other plants and even a worm to reprogram the
Cavendish not to succumb to the cell death that TR4 induces. But following the reports
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of M. acuminata’s resistance to TR4, he cast aside the strategy, knowing that a banana
modified with a gene from another kind of banana would be a far more palatable idea to
consumers.
Ironically, a major obstacle to replacing today’s Cavendish with a TR4-resistant strain is
the banana industry, which for the most part has dropped out of doing research, says
Ploetz. William Goldfield, director of corporate communications for Dole Food, one of
the largest producers and importers of bananas, said in an email that the company is
“looking at how to develop a disease resistant banana through crop improvement and
plant breeding methods,” but he didn’t go into specifics. Requests for comment from the
three other top banana producers went unanswered.
The result, Ploetz says, is that very few scientists have been focusing on the TR4
problem directly.
Which means that even if Dale’s transgenic experiment in Humpty Doo is successful, the
TR4 fungus’s march to Latin America may be inevitable.
