Bananas As We Know Them Are Doomed

[Music] we've come here to the birthplace of the Cavendish banana possibly the most important fruit in the world even by billions of us every single year we're here and they're very dance of the English countryside [Music] we're in Chatsworth House in England which is mostly known for its stunning landscapes and Gardens for over five centuries of British aristocracy and of course for being the birthplace of the Cavendish banana every banana that's grown almost around the world today is a Cavendish banana and because they don't produce seed it's the same genetic material of every plant and so pretty much ever been on this eating around the world started their journey here in the 1830s as the Cavendish dwarf banana not having seeds means you can munch your way through Cavendish bananas without chipping your teeth but it also means that they're sterile and can only be grown by replanting identical offshoots what are coming from China we think through Mauritius and they arrived in this country and the 6-2 cultivated them got them to flower and foods realized their potential as a food crop and from there they turned into a commercial pot but they started to export and that's when we all started to enjoy them on the supermarket shelf so essentially the hundreds of billions of bananas that we consume all direct clones of these bananas here this quirky looking yellow fruit was once unknown to the west but after a massive marketing campaign and an even bigger production plan it's now one of America's most consumed fresh fruits the banana business model is the cheapest fruit in the soup or also done copal or down the banana man explained how that all became possible consider that banana gets shipped thousands of miles goes bad really fast how is it possible that a banana can be so cheap well you got to control the things you can control which are labor and land and so when the banana industry started an essential part of their business model was to make sure that they didn't pay anything basically for workers and they didn't pay anything for land how did they do that military force so over and over again the banana companies took over countries Guatemala Honduras Nicaragua Colombia all over Latin America in order to make sure their business model of cheap bananas was preserved and this led to insane horrible amounts of bloodshed genocide and the birth of the term Banana Republic which meant a country that wasn't controlled by its native people but by American banana companies I mean it's kind of shaped a lot of countries and even whole continents oh yeah the very makeup of Latin America would not be the same if not for bananas now countries like Costa Rica are dominated not just by a single crop but by a single clone creating one of the world's biggest mono cultures [Music] [Music] with number seven on a plantation in Costa Rica here in las Americas where the majority of our bananas in the u.s. come on [Music] if we have brown bananas open see ministry checks every single stage of this process has to be so on every single one of these functions you go about 150 bananas bananas every day operation this big needs an equally large workforce I went to draw I went ingres berds in couple of kasi my Familia Trahan and even me papa man me mama [Music] [Music] the size of its part is enormous eight thousand boxes being filled every single day all the rivers bananas that's happening 365 days of the year I believe the scale and speed at which these bananas are cultivated packed and shipped is only possible because of the use of this one clone of banana how do we get to rely so heavily on just this one crop if you want to get profit you have to put everything in a monoculture because it's very easy to manage the whole plantation but the only problem is pests and diseases agricultural expert dr. Luis polka Sangre explained that this is the problem with mono cultures they're all susceptible to the same diseases which can spread like wildfire the people are afraid about the they call it the cancer of the bananas this cancer is known as TR for a strain of Panama disease and it's devastating banana crops around the world Panama disease is a fungus it's called Fusarium wilt and it spreads very quickly it can destroy an entire country's crop in four years as it doesn't just kill the bananas it makes it impossible to grow bananas in that place again ground zero for the spread of this disease is the Philippines the second largest banana supplier in the world bananas are central to the Filipino economy accounting for nearly 90 percent of all exported fruit so this all used to be banana said yes you know here on the edge you see quite a number of plans that are yellowing so essentially these are only affected with herkermer is a plant pathologist who works with banana corporations as well as small farmers to monitor and contain the spread of tr4 that's infected over there I can assure you that many of the plans that are here around it still look pretty good most likely they're infected too really yes how long has this been infected for teething months once you see it since this takes months you're really very very late and the farmer does everything he can to kill those plans but it's not stopping the disease that's essentially what's going on farmers here are frantically trying to stop the spread by chopping down the plants covering them with flammable rice hulls and burning the pile this entire landscape is dotted with rice whole fires you see there's spraying disinfectant and trying to quarantine the plant but I mean these people have been walking all over this area I've been walking all over this area there's no disinfectant around the farm only at the very entrance so it's so hard to contain this disease with containment nearly impossible small-time farmers are left with the difficult choice of how much land they're willing to sacrifice in order to contain the spread we have about 4,000 cases in all areas that's a huge amount of money lost for us in total how many workers if you had to layoff we there may be four of them just this month it's very hard it's midnight this is just one plantation of hundreds in the region thousands more acres of banana crops have been affected and the disease is spreading quickly monoculture is a bad thing it's not just a bad thing because it means we only get one banana and there are many more that taste good monoculture is a bad thing because it's a environmental disaster it's a cultural and social disaster it requires the transformation of forests into factories I'd say the chances of the Cavendish banana crop being devastated by Panama disease are 100% the question is will there be a replacement and will it be a replacement that repeats the monoculture and repeats the mistake or will it be part of a sort of arsenal of varietal bananas the reason he's so confident that this will happen is because it's actually happened before over 50 years ago the entire banana industry was almost wiped out by the original strain of this fungus the original banana that gave birth to the banana industry was a different breed this banana was called the gros Michel it was a bigger banana than the one we have now had tasted better in every way it was a better banana except it was susceptible to this disease and by 1960 it was what we call commercially or functionally extinct to replace it they needed a banana that looks like the gros Michelle which they been marketing for about half a century there was only one option the somewhat inferior tasting but aesthetically similar Cavendish banana they invent bagging and boxing they invent ripening rooms they come up with all these ways to make the Cavendish work and they gamble that people aren't going to care that it tastes bad and that's what happened and the Cavendish becomes our banana and the gros Michel and the lesson of the grower Michelle is totally forgotten an entire global monoculture has been built around exporting this one inferior banana which could suffer the same fate as the Grey Michelle [Music] even though worldwide there are around a thousand different types of bananas this is a Cavendish that when it ripens it doesn't turn yellow yes it's better than the Cavendish but this is not the one that is exported the market is used to a yellow banana it was real weird eating a green banana mmm 17 it's the product of hybridization moderately resistant to tier 4 so why is this one not used because the taste is no good shame what about this one this one looks funny that doesn't affect the pulp see but nobody will buy them because they judge it by the skin yeah it's not very appealing because consumers like America for instance you buy with your eyes as the industry continues to rely on the one most marketable banana the risk of this massive monoculture being wiped out by disease is ramping up tr4 has now spread all across Asia to the Middle East and then to Africa back in Latin America one botanist dr. Juan Aguilar is the bananas best hope of survival we went to Honduras where he and his team of scientists are inventing new breeds in the hopes of finding a marketable disease resistant banana the pollinator is the person who makes X pill banana white needy - for example I am resistant to cancer and Jew is not resistant to cancer we need to make love make sex together some oh maybe we'll be resistant to cancer this is the spearmint this is the male flower if you put your fingers you feel that the female is a sticky this female is ready to make sex today only today okay so these little guys are completely resistant to TR for what they've got to do now is isolate this one resistant trait and put it into the Cavendish to crossbreed it the problem is that could be a really really long laborious process these bananas are incapable of sexually reproducing on their own so aquilo's doing it for them three months after pollination these bananas are harvested peeled and squashed by koalas own estimates it takes about 12,000 bananas to find a single seed once they find a seed it's grown to see what traits it carries before being cross bred multiple times to create the hybrid thereafter it's kind of worrisome if this is one of the most viable solutions for our Tier four problem worldwide they've been going for decades and they still haven't found a ti4 resistant Cavendish and who knows how many more decades they're gonna be going for before they do find one well a gorilla continues his search for that ultimate golden disease-resistant banana its future as a monoculture crop that poses a bigger question about our agricultural systems by demanding the cheapest most uniform products in our lunch boxes we don't just run the risk of losing the almighty banana but also the biodiversity of life on Earth conventional plant breeding making buy crosses like pathology Larry's doing that is fundamental we had also to try to change the mind of the market also and the consumers scientists cannot do it this is a word that perhaps you that are working in media you can promote this idea I'll say bananas for yes why not why not you you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 2,914,080

Rating: 4.8501101 out of 5

Keywords: bananas, cavendish banana extinction, VICE News Tonight, panama disease of banana, vice isobel yeung, banana disease, VICE News, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, vice news 2019, Cavendish, cavendish banana tree, cavendish banana farming, Latin America, VICE on HBO free, Isobel Yeung, food and agriculture, panama disease, Chatsworth House, biodiversity, Gus Molina, climate, environment, south america, rare fruit, Banana song

Id: 2Bm5NWCMlPo

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GoldenDiamonds]

As a banana fan I want to taste these better tasting bananas.

[u/[deleted]]

Tldw: the bland tasting cheap to mass produce bananas that grocery stores all use are doomed. We still have good bananas

[u/RemedyofNorway]

Just do some gene editing on the michelle banana and make it resistant and grow that.
Sure some will dislike GMO bananas, but ppl with brains will choose them for better taste.

Pretty sure that if larger stores introduce variants of bananas and put up some info about what makes it different and how to decide if its fresh etc people will buy them. Most people that like bananas will like the alternatives as well.