Are bananas going extinct?
Humans aren’t the only species to be experiencing a pandemic. We might be seeing the back of ours, but plants/crops (our staple fruit the banana) are in the midst of their own.
Like animals, plants are vulnerable to attack from microorganisms. The infamous Irish potato famine of 1845 is the most pertinent example. The Irish population were heavily reliant on potatoes as a food source. So when the pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, ravaged their potato crops the population was debilitated. Over two million died and there was mass migration out of Ireland. Still to this day, P. infestans remains a threat to food security.
What is food security?
Food security is an individual’s ability to access sufficient, safe and nutritious food to support an active and healthy life. Individuals living with food security do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. On the other hand, food insecurity is defined as limited or uncertain access to safe, nutritionally adequate food.
To illustrate the scale of food insecurity; in July 2020 7.4 million people were infected with COVID-19 and 822 million people (over 10% of the world’s population) were facing food insecurity. Hunger related fatalities were ten times higher than COVID-19 fatalities.
The Banana
In your fruit bowl, it’s highly likely you have a bunch of bananas. It is even more likely that these are Cavendish bananas. Ninety-nine percent of exported bananas are this variety. But this never used to be the case. In the early 1900s, Gros Michel was the prominent banana species until it got wiped out by Panama Disease (or Banana Wilt) in the 1950s. The Cavendish banana was resistant to this strain of the disease, survived, and quickly became our supermarket staple.
However, in the early 1990s a new strain of Panama Disease put our new favourite bananas under threat. Since then, there has been $400 million worth of damage to the banana and its plantations.
How has Panama disease managed to spread so easily through bananas? Most commercial bananas (the Cavendish) are clones of each other. Therefore, if one plants gets infected, it’s very easy for other nearby plants to become infected.
The rapid spread of Panama disease and other plant diseases are also highly facilitated by human activities, and without accounting for this, we could be saying good bye to the humble banana.
Human impact on plant disease outbreaks
Human activities play a large role in exacerbating outbreaks of plant diseases. For example, globalisation has provided the route for global food trade but has also delivered a path for the transmission of pathogens. Increasing incidences of extreme weather events due to the climate crisis have a major impact on the spread of plant pathogens. Hurricanes can transport fungal spores over continents and more frequent rainfall allows the spread of airborne pathogens.
As a result of humans partaking in the spread of plant diseases, we are ultimately reducing the food available to us. And soon, it may not only be bananas that we are witnessing being hit by a pandemic.
