Bananas Tres

I opened the internet to check my email earlier and a news headline on the homepage caught my attention. It read "Disease Wiping Out Bananas, Could Be Extinct In Just Five Years." I clicked on the link and came to an article by Geoff Williams which then lead me to another article entitled "Why Bananas are a Parable of Our Time" by Johann Hari of the Seattle Post Intelligence. The gist of the article is this...

Around 150 years ago there were many types of bananas that grew in jungles around the world. The United Fruit Company singled out one type (the Gros Michel, or Big Mike as its referred to) and started mass producing it for sale across the world. This sounds like a good plan until realizing what a negative business model United Fruit Company used, finding weak, un-wealthy countries, burn down the rainforest to plant your crop, make the local workers depend on you, and then when something goes wrong with the crop dump chemicals on it or move on to the next country and start over. These Gros Miche bananas, which no longer exist, suffered a fate of a strange disease now known as Panama Disease. Panama Disease is a fungus that attacks the plant, kills the leaves, and makes bananas inedible. There is no cure or treatment for the disease. When this species died out, United Fruit found a replacement, the Cavendish banana that we now eat, which they thought at the time was immune to Panama Disease. However, we know know that it was not immune and, due to the homogeneity of the crop and farming practices used by the corporations, the bananas that we now know and love are being killed off again. The article states that in as little as 5 or as many as 30 years, Cavendish bananas will be extinct. Though there are other alternative species of bananas we could use as a replacement, none will have the same texture or taste as the ones we know and love now. This is especially disturbing to me, a banana lover.

Infected Banana Plants