Australian agricultural scientist Professor James Dale touches on why a lack of genetic diversity and an overreliance on a single variety have put bananas at risk of commercial extinction in this extract from his new book, The Future of Bananas
If, like me, you live in a developed country, chances are when you go to your local supermarket, the fruit and vegetable section will be prominent, usually directly as you enter. It gives us a ‘virtuous’ feeling of buying healthy and fresh.
Taking centre stage in that section will be a large display of beautiful, pristine yellow fruit: bananas, the world’s favourite fruit, available all year round and at a very reasonable price. Look around. There are maybe five different varieties of apples, four different peaches, three different cauliflowers – white, orange and purple – plenty of choice for potatoes but just one banana: Cavendish, the variety named after the Cavendish family, the Dukes of Devonshire. Of course, your bananas didn’t come from the family’s ancestral holdings in northern England. They are the fruits of tropical plants.
There is so much more to bananas than the yellow fruit that we are conditioned to recognise. Bananas were one of the earliest crops, farmed in Asia, more than six thousand years ago, eventually expanding out of Asia through Africa and finally the Americas. They have a colourful history of exploitation, corruption and political interference as entrepreneurs established export markets in North America and Europe.
There is an amazing diversity of varieties: fruits of different colours, textures, tastes and aromas with a multitude of uses. Tiny bananas with paper-thin skins are super sweet; big starchy bananas are steamed for hours and mashed as the staple foods of East Africa; the orange-fleshed bananas of Micronesia are stuffed full of beta-carotene; the plantains of Africa and the Pacific are huge and delicious; Kayinja, a popular banana in Uganda, is used to make beer. There is even a relative of the banana called Manila hemp, grown in the Philippines for its long strong fibres for rope-making.
All of these bananas have one thing in common: they are all ancient varieties selected by farmers over many centuries from naturally occurring hybrids. They were never bred, or rather they were bred by nature. They were almost certainly selected by humans because the fruits have no seed; they are sterile. Great for eating, but not so great for evolving. And now the world has moved on, but the banana hasn’t.
The environment where that original Cavendish grew is very different from today’s. There was no monoculture, no global warming, no disease pandemics. And herein lies the challenge: the banana as we know it faces commercial extinction, due in large part to Panama Disease tropical race 4 (TR4) which is decimating plants globally.
Can science help to save our favourite fruit? Despite Cavendish having no seed, we now have technologies that can breed new banana varieties by the centuries-old but modified technique of crossing one banana with another. We even have technologies that can subtly alter the genetic makeup of bananas to make them resistant to diseases, or to add nutritional value – and this is where my expertise and interests lie.
My team and I have developed a genetically modified Cavendish banana called QCAV-4. It is resistant to Panama Disease TR4 and has been released for commercial production in Australia, becoming the first genetically modified banana released in the world. With our close colleagues in Uganda, our ‘golden bananas’ await release in East Africa.
I think, and hope, we can ensure the banana has a future, despite the red tape and regulation that often slows and stops progress.
Edited extract from The Future of Bananas by James Dale, out now from Melville House UK.
In the book, the Australian agricultural scientist traces the history of the banana to understand why it is such an important fruit, why its future is under threat, and why the western world is obsessed with one variety: the Cavendish.
Using the latest cutting-edge research and technology, Dale’s book presents a vision for saving the world’s most eaten fruit, which is on the path to extinction. The author and his team at the Queensland University of Technology have in fact created the world’s first genetically modified banana approved for commercial production, called QCAV-4. Could this be the future? And what else might be in store?
