According to the Globe and Mail, the banana as we know it (a single cloned organism that is vulnerable to all manner of parasites and problems) will be gone from the earth's face inside of a decade. Bye bye, bananas.
Then Panama disease, a soil fungus, attacked banana plantations and the genetically enfeebled Gros Michel banana was virtually wiped out. By 1960, the Gros Michel was no longer a viable crop. Tireless agricultural research eventually produced a successor, the Cavendish. For the past 40 years or so, the Cavendish has been virtually the only commercially grown stock available on store shelves in developed nations.
In the tropics, you can still find other, less desirable banana varieties, mainly grown as a starchy food staple rather than a sweet treat. But these tropical bananas aren't much like their commercial cousins in North American supermarkets. They taste bland. Their texture is often fibrous and mealy. North American consumers would probably find them quite unpalatable compared to the Cavendish, which is sweeter and smoother-textured.
But like its genetic predecessor, the Cavendish is also sterile, equally unprotected from diseases and crop pests. And now a powerful plant pathogen, the Black Sigatoka fungus, has appeared on the scene, attacking the Cavendish stock around the world. Banana yields have already dropped by 50-70 per cent, and banana-tree life spans have been reduced from about 30 years to just about two years. The genetic uniformity among Cavendish bananas has made them helpless to fight Black Sigatoka.
