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The Cavendish Banana Will Soon Be Gone
- SlipperySlope 10y agoCRISPR to the rescue.
- jedberg 10y agoI'm not sure if your comment is a joke or not, but it's not a bad idea. Find one of the few remaining Gros Michels, edit it so that it is resistant to Fusarium, and start growing them again. And the same could be done with other monoculture crops. It then becomes an arms race between scientists and viruses.
- zitterbewegung 10y agoIs this a submarine post ? This article gets regurgitated every year .
- StargazyPi 10y agoIt was on the cover of the New Scientist 14 years ago! https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2378%20/ https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2378%20/
- ethagknight 10y agoThey said it 'could be gone within 10 years' 14 years ago, and (I'm not an economist, I could be thinking of this wrong) yet bananas are cheaper than ever before when accounting for inflation. Not only that, the relative price of bananas have held steady for 5 yrs now. These sorts of articles should include a subtitle stating "... if nothing else is allowed to adapt or react except for the threat mentioned in the article" http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=bananas&months=240 http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=bananas&mon...
- soperj 10y agoPretty sure Sea Ice is the same, it was supposed to be gone a long time ago (at least during the summer months). If you say anything about it though people collectively lose their shit.
- jes5199 10y agowell, sea ice is measurably smaller: https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iqr_timeseries.png https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iq...
- soperj 10y agoNot saying it isn't. Just that it was supposed to be gone, and it's still closer to the levels in the late 70s than it is to gone even at it's lowest.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoFrankly, I think it's a good thing if an article saying "X is doomed within ten years" keeps resurfacing year after year, long after its own deadline has passed. Maybe people will notice that that sort of reporting tends to be nonsense.
- angry_octet 10y agoIt is weak thinking to state that rare high risk events that haven't occurred no longer require risk mitigation.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoYou may have drawn a different lesson from "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" than everybody else.
- angry_octet 10y ago
- s0rce 10y agoI remember getting that issue years ago, it seemed like over-hyped fear mongering then just as much does today.
- macintux 10y agoI too felt it a bit repetitive conceptually, but this article does at least make an attempt to discuss the broader agricultural monoculture we've established.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 10y agoI vaguely remember seeing this before but this article was still quite insightful. Definitely feel like tasting a Gros Michel now. If you ever visit India try an Indian carrot (a red carrot), it's incredibly juicy compared with the orange ones I'm used to you get in stores in the UK/USA.
- chrischen 10y agoI hope stories like this bring to light the dangers of letting parents select genes or traits in their kids. Humans tend to shoot themselves in the foot and make poor predictive choices. They also tend to cluster, and if beauty trends are any identifier, letting people select genes will inevitably lead to a trend of less generic diversity among humans.
- AndrewKemendo 10y agoYour basic argument is the naturalistic fallacy, that "nature" "chooses" more optimally than directed engineering can. I wouldn't disagree that genetic diversity in plants and animals increase the speed of survival and adaptability probabilities in aggregate. That is however a significantly different argument than the goal of optimization which is what parents are doing when they eg. select for an embryo without BRCA-1.
- Ygg2 10y agoNo. The "market"/"humans" doesn't choose optimally for long term survival. They optimize for some parameter, which bears little to no correlation with greater chances for survival. You can see this everywhere, from tomatoes (and now even cherry tomatoes) that taste like cardboard because producers optimize for pretty looks (which are used to determine if the product is faulty); to bananas.
- PeterisP 10y agoThe argument is that engineering directed towards our short-term wishes seems quite likely to produce a result that's even worse for our long-term needs than simply continuing random wandering. If we value diversity or some other population metric, then directed engineering can optimize also for that, and better than nature; however, realistically speaking, we're more likely to fall victim to some fad that embryos with gene ABCD-1 seem like the best kids ever but then a generation later find out in large scale that two parents with ABCD-1 result in kids with some horrible side effect. Just as we optimize for fruit that look well but taste bland (because the consumers in supermarket look but don't taste), we are at a risk to optimize our next generation for "marketable" features at the cost of important but less visible things, e.g. athletic performance at expense of old-age wellbeing, early IQ scores at the expense of mental stability, cosmetic features at the expense of resistance to diseases which didn't matter before a homo sapiens monoculture.
- marcoperaza 10y agoThe article is a good read but I really hate the repeated assertions that clones are all part of the same single organism. That's just not true--that's not how "organism" is defined. The analogy they use to justify it, the ant colony, is just as inaccurate; each ant is an individual organism. Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but there's someone out there walking away from this article with a terrible misunderstanding of what an "organism" is. Science journalism should be about informing, not misinforming.
- NikolaNovak 10y agoIn the example they themselves use, I doubt two identical twins would be considered part of the same organism in human world...
- cardiffspaceman 10y agoDid you miss the weasel words "An argument can be made"? Of course, after using this clause, the writer writes as if the argument that clones are parts of a singular whole was made elsewhere, so he can use that conclusion as an axiom. I agree with you calling this out as sloppy. "Some believe" that all the (science) writers on the WWW need to be subjected to a marathon of "In search of..." episodes so that they have a chance to see how transparent these cliches are.
- samirillian 10y agoAnd the claim that this is some sort of historical anomaly is a bit misleading. Palatable apples, for example, cannot be reliably grown from seed. (Which was why all Johnny Appleseed's seeds were for hard cider) But yeah, if you've had even one really good banana (I had a few in Rwanda), you know how inferior the flavor of the Cavendish is.
- ska 10y agoMuch of industrial agriculture has, for presumably straightforward economic reasons, been focused around product that either produce more something (even if that's mostly water) per unit effort, or store and ship much better. Optimizing for these things has been far more successful than flavor or nutritional content.
- seunosewa 10y agoThe inconvenience of having to switch to a new type of banana or coffee every few decades is barely significant in my view. I don't see why we won't always be able to replace the popular varieties that are wiped out by diseases. Seed banks have been a thing for a very long time.
- twoodfin 10y agoAgree. And if financial markets are working properly, the risk of disaster should be priced in, affecting the cost of raising capital for growers and giving them an incentive to plan alternatives.
- scj 10y agoThere should be two incentives. One is the monoculture risk mentioned earlier. The second is that a viable alternative might be developed that is more appealing than the current product.
- munificent 10y ago> if financial markets are working properly What makes you assume they do?
- andrewla 10y agoMy understanding is that flavor is only part of the equation here. The more important thing in a lot of cases is yield of fruit -- most plants that evolved naturally will not produce the amount of fruit needed for agriculture, just because that's a huge waste of energy. You find varieties that do produce an abundance of fruit, and those are the ones that you start cultivating. Given that constraint, there aren't a lot of ways to jump; very few high-yield banana varieties are available, and none of them really sweet except for the Dwarf Cavendish and Grand Nain cultivars. Agricultural researchers are constantly trying to grow new bananas from seed (which is the easiest way to pursue genetic diversity) but I'm not aware of any new sweet and productive cultivars that have arisen in recent times.
- justinator 10y agoWell, when's the last time you peeled a banana and where confronted with a mass of unpalatable seeds? We eat a specific mutated banana from a plant that can only be cloned to get more banana plants. This isn't out of the ordinary from things we eat. Take the navel orange, or seedless almost anything; lots of different types of apples aren't grown from seed anymore - a cutting is made from a tree, and attached to a different species of apple tree.
- zymhan 10y agoThis is not new, nor is it imminent. http://www.npr.org/2011/07/22/138610585/yes-we-do-have-bananas-for-now http://www.npr.org/2011/07/22/138610585/yes-we-do-have-banan...
- lr4444lr 10y agoThe aspect of human nature in this story that I least understand is why we're so ready to pay cheaper base plus value-added costs for a seemingly infinite variety of processed foods made from a very small set of basic ingredients, instead of a higher base with no post-processing costs for a seemingly infinite variety of natural foods at what might be the same grand total cost, and better sustainability. Maybe modern life gets too chaotic, and people want the comfort of reliable sensations in their food? I dunno... I can only speak for myself, as I get excited to see new produce varietals in the supermarket. Maybe others just prefer the new brand variations of junk foods.
- Declanomous 10y agoI think it's disingenuous to call foods made from typical ingredients 'junk food'. Your argument really only makes sense if you accept that cost of both options would be similar. I highly doubt that is the case. Even if you can provide a wide variety of unprocessed foods in to the supermarket at the same cost you can provide processed foods in to the super market, the cost would not be the same. Unprocessed foods, by their very definition, require processing. The majority of food people eat is not raw. So now I have to spend more time preparing food. Time isn't free. Even if I'm already preparing food from scratch, you have to learn how to prepare new varieties of food, even if they are marginally different. For instance, I have bought new varieties of rice and sweet potatoes recently, and each time I've had to do a fair amount of research on how to prepare them. And rice and sweet potatoes are foods that I cook by themselves. Preparing a dish with a completely new ingredient takes significantly more That's not even accounting for economies of scale on the production side. The produce that makes it to the supermarket is a small subset of all of the produce grown. If you want your food to be inexpensive, what you purchase is going to be affected by the demands of industrial food manufacturing. So there might be 1000 types of potatoes in the world, but since McDonalds is only buying one type, 50% of the potatoes grown could be of a single variety. Plus the products that supermarkets stock are dictated by demand, spoilage, and durability. So even if you want heirloom something-or-other, you might find them extremely difficult to track down because they go bad too quickly in a supermarket, or they bruise easily. They might even just look bad under fluorescent light, who knows. I'm not saying more variety isn't a good thing; I get excited when new product varietals appear in my store. However I think it's extremely understandable that supermarkets don't carry a wider variety of stock. If you are looking for a wider variety, I've found that Hispanic produce stores and farmer's markets always have a lot of produce that I don't even recognize.
- noer 10y agoI feel like I've read the same article about the decline of the Gros Michel, the rise of the Cavendish and the eminent extinction of the Cavendish at least once a year for 10 years.
- freehunter 10y agoProblem is, we're not exactly sure when disaster will strike. Someday a disease is going to wipe that banana off the map, we just don't know when.
- pif 10y agoIndeed! http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080606 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080606 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080607 http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080607
- nakedrobot2 10y agoSo... we will "just" start using another one of the hundreds of varieties of bananas, right? I guess the Cavendish is particularly interesting from an industrial point of view, but for that same reason, probably isn't the nicest-tasting one anyway? Can any banana connoisseurs chime in here?
- acjohnson55 10y agoI have to wonder if the advent of renewable energy and vertical farming could eventually make these concerns extinct. I have a dream of a future world where human population stabilizes (as it seems to be doing), and vertical farming allows us to utilize far less land area (and maybe sea) for sustenance. Closed-system farms seem like they could be much more robust against pests and pathogens.
- Asooka 10y agoHere's the thing about Wired: I can't read it.
- andrewla 10y agoPutting aside the hysteria of the impending extinction of the Cavendish (which so far seems to be at a stalemate), this situation is not unique to bananas. Pretty much all fruit trees used in agriculture are produced by cloning; generally speaking producing excess fruit is not a productive mutation for a plant, especially when the fruit is high calorie. So to a good approximation, fruit trees grown from seed are extremely unlikely to bear enough fruit to be useful. Sweet bananas are the example used here, but pretty much all fruit trees share this. There's essentially one (two if you count Dwarf Cavendish) sweet banana -- all sweet bananas you find in a store will be clones of one of those two. Same for avocados -- exactly two genetically identical sources of avocados (at commercial scale; a wild avocado tree will produce some small number of avocados every couple of years). Apples have a much greater variety of cultivars, but every Red Delicious you eat comes from a tree that is a genetic clone of all the others. There's a danger from monocultures in agriculture in general, but at least for plants grown from seed, there's some natural genetic variety that might yield resistance from large-scale blights. Fruit trees are much more vulnerable to this sort of problem.
- scythe 10y agoThere are apparently some breeding strategies used with the Cavendish: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noelani_Van_den_Berg/publication/44635121_Tolerance_in_banana_to_Fusarium_wilt_is_associated_with_early_up-regulation_of_cell_wall-strengthening_genes_in_the_roots/links/540619c80cf2bba34c1e3e28/Tolerance-in-banana-to-Fusarium-wilt-is-associated-with-early-up-regulation-of-cell-wall-strengthening-genes-in-the-roots.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noelani_Van_den_Berg/pu...
- username223 10y ago> Pretty much all fruit trees used in agriculture are produced by cloning I was surprised some years ago when I learned that most apple trees are grafts: you take a branch from a tree with apples you like, attach it to a shoot of some other apple tree, and it will produce the apples you like. A neighbor's tree had burned down, and he had no idea what sort of apples the shoots sprouting from the stump would produce.
- riphay 10y agoFor those who want to take a deep dive in the world of bananas, great article about what different people are trying to do about the problem (from 2011): http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/we-have-no-bananas http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/10/we-have-no-bana...
- timcederman 10y agoFYI - you can still find the Gros Michel banana. You can buy your own plant off Amazon if you like (https://www.amazon.com/Gros-Michel-Banana-Plant-Variety/dp/B0094JDSAC https://www.amazon.com/Gros-Michel-Banana-Plant-Variety/dp/B...). I grew up regular eating the still-available lady finger banana, which really does taste much much better than the Cavendish. I also love eating apple bananas when I'm in Hawaii. My point being saying it will be "gone" is likely hyperbole. It may end up being less cheaply and readily available, but there are efforts in place now to find its successor which has similar qualities, but is resistant to the numerous problems facing the Cavendish. At this point it looks most likely to be the Goldfinger banana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_banana.
- ianai 10y agoI'm pretty sure HN promotes these stories as a group exercise in critical thinking and analysis.
- hadrianpaulo 10y agoThis is a real problem for my country (Philippines), especially for provinces and agricultural companies that grow and sell Cavendish bananas. Banana production and exports were lessened by at least 20% just last 2015 and it's largely attributed to the Panama Wilt. Sadly, no solutions to cure the disease exist right now even with years of multinational research.
- valuearb 10y agoBananas aren't even bananas. Wild bananas were nothing like what we eat today, before humans started eating them and selecting them for our preferred traits.