Yes, we have no bananas

[ebonlock]

I was just reading this piece on the dire state of corn farmers this season over at Sadly, No!:

Bottom line: I think the corn crop this year will be terrible. And though the books will reflect more acres planted in soybeans, that crop too will be relatively crappy. Even the rice here in Arkansas is late, with some of the ugliest stands I’ve ever seen. All of which means, compounded with all the fund dollars flooding the markets, that prices will keep going up. Not that farmers will realize as much of this profit as you might believe. For instance, the other day when wheat closed at $8.89, I got paid a whopping $6.37 a bushel for my share of thirty paltry acres of soft red winter. This huge differential is officially called the “basis,” but around here it’s called “how much you get fucked.”

And in the comments I was led to this piece on the upcoming banana apocalypse which is even more gloomy:

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon – in five, 10 or 30 years – the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world – and where they are leading us.
[...]
A corporation called United Fruit took one particular type – the Gros Michael – out of the jungle and decided to mass produce it on vast plantations, shipping it on refrigerated boats across the globe. The banana was standardised into one friendly model: yellow and creamy and handy for your lunchbox.

There was an entrepreneurial spark of genius there – but United Fruit developed a cruel business model to deliver it. As the writer Dan Koeppel explains in his brilliant history Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, it worked like this. Find a poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it won't, topple it and replace it with one that will.

Burn down its rainforests and build banana plantations. Make the locals dependent on you. Crush any flicker of trade unionism. Then, alas, you may have to watch as the banana fields die from the strange disease that stalks bananas across the globe. If this happens, dump tonnes of chemicals on them to see if it makes a difference. If that doesn't work, move on to the next country. Begin again.

It's a fascinating piece on how the standard corporate mindset, i.e. short-term maximization of profits at the expense of all other considerations, is directly leading to the possible end of a species. The very idea that the day may come in our lifetimes when a yellow banana is simply a fond memory, seems hard to grasp and yet here we are thanks to corporate greed and the inability to see just how dangerous a monocultural farming format could be. It'll be unpleasant for those of us here in the first world who enjoy the fruits, but there are places in the world that rely on it as a basic subsistence food and they are so unbelievably screwed.

Comments

[andybeals.livejournal.com]

There are many sorts of bananas, and the agronomists have been worrying about something like this taking out the Cavendish banana for years now (The Atlantic had an article about it about two years ago)…and now it turns out the same Panama Disease that took out the Gros Michel^ is also poised to wipe out all of the clones of the Cavendish. Fortunately for those who are dependent on bananas and plantains, there are plenty of cultivars of bananas.

In fact, there was an entire shipping fleet dedicated to shipping Gros Michel bananas that had to be scrapped once they were wiped out — Cavendish has a very different set of handling & shipping parameters.

[elenderel.livejournal.com]

It's stuff like this that makes me wish I was an air plant. It's also stuff like this that's driving me toward the eat local movement, the slow food movement, heirloom varieties of vegetables, co-ops, etc. I just cannot bear to take part in any more corporate planet-raping. My dilemma is in determining how far from the corporate system I can [afford to] go.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Actually, the banana thing is an urban legend. Yes, lack of biodiversity, especially by agribusiness, is a lousy idea, but bananas are not going to go extinct, thank goodness.