You might be glad you stored those 18 black bananas in your freezer (“in case you want to make muffins”), if a killer fungus that’s wiping out the world’s banana crop continues to spread.
The crop-killing, soil-borne fungus called Fusarium wilt had been killing banana plants in Southeast Asia recently appeared in the Middle East, Africa, and Australia, leaving fruit exporters baffled and nervous.
There are different varieties of bananas just like there are different kinds of apples and some of these varieties are better at fighting off some strains of Fusarium than others. The trouble is that we don’t grow lots of types of bananas, we pretty much just grow one—the Cavendish. Literally, it is all the same banana: the Cavendish bananas are clones. And this banana sucks at fighting off this newest strain of Fusarium.
“The Cavendish variety is really important. It’s about half of the bananas worldwide,” Randy C. Ploetz, a tropical fruit pathologist at the University of Florida, told me over the phone. “About 45 percent of all banana production is of Cavendish, so even if this strain of Fusarium didn’t affect anything else, it would really be important.”
There are other reasons fruit producers are worried, too. Since Fusarium comes from the soil, it’s difficult to detect until it’s too late. It attacks the banana at the roots, infects the plant from the ground up, and kills it from the inside out. By the time a farmer realizes something is wrong, it’s usually too late, Ploetz said.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: A Deadly Fungus Is Killing All Our Bananas
