The Speculist

The head of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain is sounding the alarm. Bananas could be extinct as a food crop within a decade.

Almost all the varieties of banana grown today are cuttings - clones, in effect - of naturally mutant wild bananas discovered by early farmers as much as 10,000 years ago. The rare mutation caused wild bananas to grow sterile, without seeds...

Plants use reproduction to continuously shuffle their gene pool, building up variety so that part of the species will survive an otherwise deadly disease. Because sterile mutant bananas cannot breed, they do not have that protection.

But of course the diseases kept evolving. Panama disease and black Sigatoka are cutting through banana plantations.

Those of us who only eat bananas occasionally may not know that this is a big problem. The banana is a major staple in parts of Asia and Africa. The resultant famine could affect millions.

...only massive amounts of fungicide spray - 40 sprayings a year is common - now keep Sigatoka at bay, and a new version of Panama disease cannot be sprayed. The Amazon banana crop has been devastated by the fungi, and according to Mr Frison, some parts of Africa now face the equivalent of the Irish potato famine.

One possibility is GM bananas, but growers fear consumer resistance. The big growers are pinning their hopes on better fungicides.

Why is poison less scary than genetic modification? We've seen this irrational fear before, but it makes no sense.

When a farmer cross-breeds two plants to come up with a new hybrid he is engaging in genetic modification - in a rather haphazard way. He is almost certainly trading new deficiencies for possible improvements. Modern genetic modification could allow a precise mixing of the best traits of all varieties - including disease resistance - to produce better, cheaper food produced on fewer more productive acres.

If the world won't accept precisely modified GM varieties, perhaps the only hope for banana farmers is to return to natural genetic modification - via plant sex:

One ray of hope comes from Honduran scientists, who peeled and sieved 400 tonnes of bananas to find 15 seeds for breeding. They have come up with a fungus-resistant variety which could be grown organically. If bananas don't disappear from supermarket shelves by 2013, they will look, and taste, different.