Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World

A Visit to the New Home of the International Banana Museum

Top Banana Glen Speer

A humble exterior, four miles south of Interstate 15.

I finally got a chance to visit the new home of the International Banana Museum (previous posts here and here) earlier this month. It was awesome! I just missed Ken Banister - the museum's founder, who moved his banana collection from the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena to the high desert town of Hesperia, California, about a year ago, but I found myself in the able hands of Glen Speer, whose business card lists him this way:

GLEN SPEER

Genuine Antique Christian Person

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, CAN"T REMEMBER

Free Advice!

Top Banana - Banana Museum

Hesperia, CA

His credentials turned out to be impeccable and true. Glen graciously showed me around, recommended that I have lunch at the omelette place across the street - over 100 types of egg-based dishes - and encouraged me to take lots of pictures, which I did. As I was leaving, another local told me to quit with the snapshots: "You'll make his head even bigger!" But from the looks of things, Glen has a lot to be proud of.

More on the museum, including additional pictures, after the jump.

Heroic Clerk Saves Store from Banana Attack

Battles Banana-Wielding Thug.

In my book, I note that one observer described the banana as a "weapon of conquest" in Latin America. This doesn't apply in Maryland, where a would-be thief attempted to use the fruit to rob a 7-Eleven - and was denied by a brave clerk.

Incredibly (or maybe not so incredibly), this isn't the first time this has happened - and the last time, the guy got eighteen months in the hoosegow for his malfeasance (third item down.)

Co-opt. Subvert. Destroy.

A bigger threat to the banana than any disease. The world's favorite fruit is the cheapest and healthiest alternative to junk food. So what would the junk food industry do?

This:

Gotta go try one.

This is so yuck I won't even comment...

I'm sorry for this picture.

Click the link, to the Daijiworld newspaper, to find out the results of the study, if you dare...

Bangalore, May 29: Nagasandra, a village 50 km from Bangalore in Doddaballapur taluk, isn’t any different from the hundreds of others surrounding it. But in a remote corner of this small village is a 1-acre banana plantation that has been part of a unique research project: a study on the effect of anthropogenic liquid waste on soil properties and crop growth. In lay-man terms, it is a study on how human urine can be used as fertilizer in agriculture...

read on...

Chiquita is Motley Fool's "Worst Stock in the World"

At least for today - Monday, June 18. The reasons include the company's dismal forecast for the third quarter (a "significant loss," it told investors); the payments it was revealed to have made to Colombian terrorists; and worries about the Panama Disease fungus arriving in Latin America. The investment site specifically takes Chiquita to task for failing to diversify its banana offerings on supermarket shelves, noting that the disease-threatened Cavendish is "the only Banana that Chiquita sells." The conclusion? "Big Trouble."

Here's what Chiquita needs to do: figure out how to sell more bananas than the Cavendish. Figure out a way to make transporting and growing them much more environmentally friendly. And move toward fair trade principles, which I think are more important - at the moment - than organics.

More here.

SPECIAL REPORT: Urgent threat to Africa's Bananas - news update, how to help

Plants killed by BXW, arguably today's deadliest banana disease.

Close up: bacterial discharge from a banana plant.

Note to readers: This is a long post, based on news reports from the past week. I think it's important - please, if you can, read it, and pass it on. Thanks.

In the months since I've been publishing this blog - and in the now six months since my book has come out - this is probably the most serious and important item I've posted. In the past week, new reports of the spread of what is the most deadly banana disease facing the crop right now - banana xanthomonas wilt (BXW) - have appeared in the African news media.

For the first time, the disease has appeared in Kenya. BXW moves easily - it can be transmitted in dirt, by people, on tools, or even by birds. It has so far appeared in the Teso, Busia, Malaba, Chakol, and Busia districts of the nation, all near the Ugandan border. Once it shows up in a banana plantation, it is likely spread by insects.

In Uganda, meanwhile, the disease has become so widespread that yields on banana farms have reached dangerously low levels. Acres and acres of crops have been lost, creating a cascade of economic losses in a trading system that spreads from the tiniest villages to Uganda's cities, all based on the transport and trade of bananas.

The urgency of this cannot be overstated. Uganda and the nations surrounding it absolutely depend on bananas as a staple foodstuff. Millions rely on bananas for survival. And the spread of BXW into Kenya is yet another indicator that this deadly disease is on the march. As with Panama Disease - the wilting fungus that threatens our banana, the Cavendish - BXW (a bacterial malady) is incurable. The difference between the two is that BXW moves faster and threatens, right now, food supplies in nations with fragile governments.

What's to be done? Two things. And I'm going to say some stuff that might disturb that regular readers of this blog, especially those who know that I take a very hard line when it comes to corporate skullduggery directed banana workers in South and Central America. In this case, I'm going to veer away from what is traditionally seen as a related "socially responsible" stance.

FIRST, banana diversity. In order to mitigate the spread of disease, the number of kinds of bananas being grown needs to be increased. But there's a real disconnect in the world of food security - that means the organizations that help manage and alleviate hunger - when it comes to bananas. A lot of them don't know how important bananas are; those that do don't pay a lot of attention to how important funding the preservation of banana diversity (and banana research in general) is. There's just not enough time or money being spent on bananas compared to other staple crops. And let's not even get into whether or not the big banana companies care to fund research that might recognize the importance of saving the sister breeds of the one they make billions on: many - if not most - banana executives don't even know that subsistence bananas exist (or that they might help in reverse, since they could contain genetic material that could help save the Cavendish, which is also threatened by disease.

SECOND, genetic engineering: It is time for the general public to recognize that working at the DNA level is not always a corporate trojan horse into destroying local agriculture and contaminating the environment. This isn't all about Monsanto. While consumers in the suburbs and Whole Foods stores protest against all GMO foods - while barely knowing what GMO is - they bluntly prevent out legitimate public research that might stop hunger. Time learn that everything has nuance, the disease that are killing the bananas: they work in just two modes: off - and on.

About the images and BXW: the first shot shows a plantation that has been destroyed by BXW. The leaves of the banana plant have turned black and yellow, and then wilted altogether. Without leaves, the banana plant dies. Another key point: in village agriculture, the death of a banana tree can mean a cascade of disaster in a family's diet, because other staple foods grow in the shade the tree creates. The second image shows bacterial material oozing from the plant itself.

Even if you think genetic engineering sucks, you should write to Fernando Aguirre, the CEO of Chiquita, and ask him to fund global banana research. This is the address:

Chiquita

250 E. Fifth Street

Cincinnati OH 45202 USA

You will probably get a form letter in reply unless you include a line in there that says something like: "I challenge you not to include a form letter in reply." You might also include printouts from the below links, or a printout of this blog entry.

Here's a link on the Kenya spread. Here's a link on the Uganda crisis. Here's a link to Bioversity International, the group that coordinates banana research worldwide. You can learn a lot more there. Things are really moving quickly now when it comes to saving the banana - but they aren't hopeless. The keys, again: Diversity. Conservation. Research.

Images via the British Society for Plant Pathology

Australia to tax bananas starting July 1

These are Australian things.

Australia's banana crop has been devastated by bad weather and Panama Disease. Now, the country is going to be imposing a AUS 1.7 cent-per-kilo (1.5 cents US) levy on the fruit. It will be applied at the wholesale level, then passed on to the consumer, starting July 1.

Nicky Singh, president of the Australian Banana Growers Council, said that revenues from the tax would raise $5 million AUS (4.7 million US) to fund "promotions, research and development, and plant health programs."

The imposition of a single-foodstuff tax is a big development, and another indication of how serious the problem of banana disease is. Australia, as I've noted before, is becoming a world epicenter for banana problems. 85% of the country's crop was destroyed by a cyclone in 2007, leaving the remaining fruit vulnerable to Panama Disease, which began to spread aggressively last year, despite a quarantine program designed to stop the malady.

News report on banana tax here.

Earlier Australia report here.

Chiquita doesn't like the iPhone

The company's chief information officer says so here. They probably use Blackberries. The phone pictured above is neither; it is LG's "Banana" model, which is only available in Korea. (OK, so it was a slow banana news week. After the onslaught of disease, terrorism, and Chiquita-related news, thank goodness.)

Read my article on Panama Disease in "The Scientist"

The most controversial part of my book is my assertion that biotech is key to saving the banana. I came by this assertion with a lot of difficulty - initially believing that most genetic engineering in our food supply was a bad thing. But, as usual, the issue isn't black and white. With bananas, the shade of gray is especially green.

Read the piece here.