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Bananas could die out, group warns

May 17, 2006
Courtesy U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization
and World Science staff

Bananas could disappear, U.N. officials are warning. Humans are wiping out more and more varieties of the fruit, they say, and those remaining are vulnerable to epidemic diseases.

Courtesy 5aday.gov

Officials of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said the central problem is that forest destruction is killing off wild bananas in India, the world’s premier producer.

Among the victims are the ancestors of the Cavendish variety, the large, pulpy dessert banana that currently accounts for virtually all of world trade. This amounts to nearly 20 million tons yearly.

Bananas are the world’s most exported fruit. Cooking bananas and plantains—eaten fried, boiled, baked or chipped—are the staple food of 400 million people in poorer countries, according to the agency.

Commercial banana varieties are highly vulnerable to pests and disease, said the organization’s NeBambi Lutaladio, an agricultural officer. This is because they’re near-clones of each other, so a disease that strikes one could sweep them all.

It has happened before. In the 1950s, Panama disease wiped out the then-dominant commercial banana, Gros Michel. Cavendish, which resisted the disease, was introduced then. But Cavendish could meet a similar fate.

One solution might be to bolster the plants’ resistance using genes from wild varieties. But with those strains disappearing, that option is fading away, Lutaladio added.

India’s lost bananas include a variety that conferred genetic resistance to the dreaded black Sigatoka fungus disease that has devastated plantations in the Amazon and elsewhere, U.N. officials said. Just one plant of the resistant variety, named Musa Acuminata spp Burmannicoides, is known to remain alive, at the Indian Botanic Gardens in Calcutta.

The organization is urging conservation efforts and systematic exploration of wild bananas’ remaining, remote forest habitats.

Alexander the Great put bananas on the map in 327 BC when, while invading India, he reported eating and enjoying them. The name banana comes from the Arab banan, or finger. Arab traders introduced the plant to Africa; the Portuguese took them to the Caribbean and Latin America.

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