Bananas: The End is Nigh

In the welter of news these last weeks you may have missed reports of the looming death of the banana, at least as we know it. Given its centrality to our way of life, its disappearance would be pretty catastrophic. Lunches and picnics would be transformed. Gyms and sports fields would never be the same. A certain graphic joke would lose its meaning…
The trigger for this impending disaster is “Panama disease” or fusarium wilt, a fungal disease that has already devastated plantations in parts of south east Asia, the Middle East and Africa. It’s the biggest crisis facing the banana since the early 20th century, when an earlier form of the fungus wiped out crops in South America.
Back then producers stopped growing the Gros Michel cultivar (which was susceptible to the fungus) and adopted the fusarium-resistant Cavendish. But 99% of bananas nowadays are Cavendish, so if the fungus spreads to South and Central America, it could be curtains for the fruit as we know it.
That isn’t the bananas’ fault. In fact there are up to a thousand different types of banana and if you’ve had the pleasure of eating bananas in Vietnam or Thailand, you’ll know how amazing less-planted species can be. These may well offer some hope for the future (though they ripen too fast to be viable for export). And no doubt there are genetic modifiers trying to breed a new Cavendish. But a monocultural industry is wide open to an epidemic – and here it comes.
It’s just another example of how the growth in human numbers, our expectations and consumer behaviours endanger the earth’s biosphere; of how the demands and supply chains of the world we have created both threaten and are threatened.
New problems keep emerging. Take the ash tree. First there was ash dieback disease. Now we hear of a beetle called the emerald ash borer that may prove even more lethal. And in the US it has spread to other trees… Cad a dhéanaimíd feasta gan adhmad?
The coral of the Great Barrier Reef is dying. Deserts are growing. The oceans are clogged with plastic, atomised by wind and water and swirled into great rotating gyres in mid ocean. New temperature records are being set annually, as are new lows for sea ice. The Chinese are looking at a new sea route across the north of Canada. Great rivers of the world like the Mekong, the Amazon and the Yellow River are in trouble from damming, silting, flooding and unregulated dumping.
Vast clouds of smoke and dust plume over Asia, from coal-fired power stations, hundreds of millions of cars and motorcycles, charcoal braziers, burning forests and bogs and, of course, construction. Humans have ground so much stone into cement that the vast blocks of buildings constitute a new geological format. And if we harbour ambitions to equalise the housing conditions across the earth, that construction boom is only starting.
There are record levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Indeed, levels rose last year by the biggest margin since records began, according to the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Human activities are the principal problem. Yes, climate oscillates and yes, there are sources of carbon dioxide in nature, but the evidence is conclusive: humans have dramatically raised carbon levels through burning fossil fuels and slashing and burning forests in the tropics and temperate zones for timber, and to clear land for farming.
This human contribution is exacerbated by natural forces such as this year’s El Niño. This has triggered droughts and erratic rainfall – which in turn causes less carbon to be stored by forests and drylands. This year’s jump in CO2 is even greater than was seen in 1998, also a big El Niño year.
Global atmospheric CO2 levels increased by the same amount in the last 10 years as has been measured for 1,000 years at the end of the last ice age.
And this is before we contemplate the rise in methane. It has doubled since pre-industrial levels, mainly due to increased emissions from rice fields, cattle and landfills. Indeed, many climate experts now argue that reducing meat consumption would generate over a quarter of the emission reductions needed by 2050.
People in industrialised countries eat twice as much meat as is healthy – and that’s on average! They say that when the average American dies there’s five pounds of partially digested meat in his gut. He could do with less, methinks! But it’s not just Americans. As we are constantly told, obesity rates are rising dramatically. Eat less and both our bodies and the earth benefit. What’s not to like?
Representatives of more than 170 countries turned up in France last week to sign the Paris Climate Agreement. That gives some hope that change may come, but it also underlines how close to catastrophe we are.
And that begs another question. The wealthy can buy survival, health and longevity, the poor can’t. Right across the world, the gap between rich and poor countries and communities is growing.
For this, you can blame the general adoption in the developed world of economic liberalism and free-market economics. This economic philosophy and worldview really took hold during the Reagan-Thatcher era. Well, it hasn’t led to the democratisation of wealth, as was promised: it has led instead to an increased sequestration of the world’s wealth by a small global elite. The slimy dealings exposed in the Panama Papers merely show us how they do it.
Of course, as well as being a tax cheat’s haven, Panama is also a banana republic nonpareil. Over the last century many dirty deeds have been perpetrated by fruit companies involved in banana cultivation.
In this, it’s just another example of the unhealthy and unequal relationship between our developed world’s myriad supply lines and both global and local politics. It follows that major change on climate should be accompanied by major change in economic policy. There are profound ethical issues to both and if we want to survive – and, to be clear, that’s not too strong a word – we need to address these issues.
If we don’t we’ll be lamenting the loss of much more than bananas.