Bad Bananas - The Banana is going extinct

[rcmaehl]

Source:

Wired
 

TL;DR:
The plant that we know as "the banana" is dying due to fungi and opposition to GMO plants.

 

Media:

 

Quotes/Excerpts:

Quote

This Taiwanese pathogen was unlike any banana disease he’d encountered before.  Tropical Race 4 (TR4)...lives in the soil, is impervious to pesticides, and kills banana plants. TR4 only affects a particular type of banana called the Cavendish. But no banana has become as ubiquitous as the Cavendish, which accounts for 47 per cent of all global production of the fruit....50 billion tonnes of Cavendish bananas every year... 99 per cent of all global banana exports. The...banana industry has been balancing on a knife edge for decades. “It looks very stable because we’re getting bananas, but the...costs that allow that to happen have been high,” If one part of this tightly-wound supply chain snaps, the whole export industry could come tumbling down. By concentrating all their efforts on the Cavendish, banana exporters have built a system that allows a tropical fruit grown thousands of kilometres away to appear on supermarket shelves in the UK for less than £1 per kilo.  It is this genetic uniformity that lays the foundation for an $8 billion-a-year export industry. The Cavendish has no defense against TR4. As TR4 creeps across the globe towards Latin America, the Cavendish’s genetic uniformity is starting to look like a curse. So far, Latin America, which grows almost all of the world’s export bananas – including those for the US and Europe – has escaped TR4. But, Ploetz says, it’s only a matter of time.

 

My Thoughts:

While I may have ended the quotes/excerpts on a massive sour note, it should be noted the article continues for a long time and goes on to say about GMO bananas and the hardship of getting them approved and accepted by the publish, regulators, and other entities. It is a very interesting read if you have 30-45 minutes. While I personally have texture issues with bananas I do like banana flavoring among other things. Will GMO bananas finally be accepted or will a new banana take the current one's place? Only time will tell.

[Levent]

since when "Tech News" includes death of bananas?

inb4

[Fasauceome]

5 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

TR4

Secretly a story about threadripper, that's why it's tech news

[GoldenLag]

Just now, fasauceome said:

Secretly a story about threadripper, that's why it's tech news

Threadripper, now goes 100% bananas with a touch of radioactive potassium 

[TimeOmnivore]

6 minutes ago, Levent said:

since when "Tech News" includes death of bananas? 

Because if bananas go extinct, we won't be able to use bananas for scale anymore, which would be a devastating blow to the tech industry.

[DVA]

Guys, don't you know that CPUs use the sacred banana peel as a piece of its hardware

[Crunchy Dragon]

-Moved to Off Topic-

[lewdicrous]

This calls for a quiet celebration.

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, DVA said:

Guys, don't you know that CPUs use the sacred banana peel as a piece of its hardware

Wait....... Did we finally figure out what Intel's TIM was made out of?

[DVA]

But really, it was only a matter of time before nature started rejecting all of its selected breeding and mass harvesting, not to mention the usage of GMO's by Monsanto 

[DVA]

Just now, GoldenLag said:

Wait....... Did we finally figure out what Intel's TIM was made out of?

What we figured out was what the Intel shortage came from. 

 

Bananas going extinct, Intel CPU's skyrocketing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT

[GoldenLag]

Just now, DVA said:

What we figured out was what the Intel shortage came from. 

 

Bananas going extinct, Intel CPU's skyrocketing. Coincidence? I THINK NOT

And intel just changed to solder

 

MY GOD

[Lady Fitzgerald]

53 minutes ago, lewdicrous said:

This calls for a quiet celebration.

I agree! I can't stand the smell stench of banana's, let alone the taste! One of the worst jobs I ever had was when I worked for a convenience chain and they went bananas for bananas. We would get cases of the misbegotten things with the grocery order that was delivered on my shift so I had to take the previous shipment off display (we sold only a small percentage of each shipment) and replace them with the new batch. I had to hold my breath the entire time to keep from tossing my cookies due to the nauseating stench.

 

Hauling trash to the dumpster was worse since I could smell the blasted things rotting in the dumpster from five feet away upwind. Opening the lid violated the Geneva Convention's ban on chemical warfare!

[dalekphalm]

7 hours ago, DVA said:

not to mention the usage of GMO's by Monsanto 

Except this article actually kind of suggests the opposite? The problem is that the Banana industry is largely against GMO's, despite the fact that they are largely beneficial for humanity.

 

The problem is that the most commonly sold natural bananas have no resistance to this particular disease. GMO's are likely to actually save bananas in this case.

 

Whether you like them or not, GMO's are the future of feeding humanity.

[handymanshandle]

Bummer, the only way I'll eat bananas is as bread and even then that's kinda meh.

[wasab]

Wild banana is already extinct. What we have now are domesticated bananas which are losing even the most basic ability to sexually reproduce without the help of us humans. 

[Andreas Lilja]

Bananas are disgusting.

[DVA]

43 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Except this article actually kind of suggests the opposite? The problem is that the Banana industry is largely against GMO's, despite the fact that they are largely beneficial for humanity.

 

The problem is that the most commonly sold natural bananas have no resistance to this particular disease. GMO's are likely to actually save bananas in this case.

 

Whether you like them or not, GMO's are the future of feeding humanity.

Oh I totally get it, I also get how they don't really do any harm to the people that consume them. It's just horrible what this company has done to farmers. That's a totally different topic though, I guess I just dislike what the company has done to some people. =/

[DVA]

9 minutes ago, Raskolnikov said:

Bananas are disgusting.

How can I get a -1 or a thumbs down added to this

[dalekphalm]

6 minutes ago, DVA said:

Oh I totally get it, I also get how they don't really do any harm to the people that consume them. It's just horrible what this company has done to farmers. That's a totally different topic though, I guess I just dislike what the company has done to some people. =/

Business practices of some GMO companies aside, some companies are douches - regardless of their industry

[captain_to_fire]

On 10/12/2018 at 1:00 AM, Lady Fitzgerald said:

I can't stand the smell stench of banana's, let alone the taste!

 

On 10/12/2018 at 7:17 AM, dalekphalm said:

Whether you like them or not, GMO's are the future of feeding humanity.

I think a lot of anti-GMO people don't realize that they use GMOs without realizing it. 

[TetraSky]

That fungi has been around for over 60 years and is responsible for killing off the Big Mike/Gros Michel variety of banana (which most banana flavored stuff today is based on), Cavendish was the solution at the time to survive the panama disease. (or Fusarium oxysporum)

It has since evolved to new strains that target the Cavendish variety so they have to spray fungicide every 6 days just to keep the fungi from spreading further, which is expensive AF.

This is what happens when you essentially put all your eggs in the same basket, it's bound to fail at one point.

Yet they are still delaying the deployment of new variety of bananas and keep on clinging onto Cavendish...

 

There need to be biodiversity to prevent these kind of fungi from infecting our food sources, unfortunately, due to the way bananas are cultivated, each banana tree is essentially a clone of each other, meaning the fungi just need to adapt to one tree to infect all of them.

 

Not to mention, they've already long engineered new varieties of banana, like the Goldfinger variety which took off in Australia(but not at all in NA) and is resistant to TR4 (Panana disease).

 

So no, bananas are not going extinct. The kind you know the most likely will, but others will replace it, stronger and better. Until the cycle repeats itself again.

 

(Funny how there's a thread of this when I was literally doing research on this topic 3 days ago)