Banana X: Rethinking the Banana of the Future
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” — Charles Dickens’s opener aptly sums up the predicament of the modern banana.
Never before in the fruit’s long and wild history has it enjoyed such ubiquity. Bananas are grown in 135 countries, and are one of the most exported fruits; last year alone, seven billion dollars worth of bananas bobbed along the high seas in fleets of temperature-controlled ships, with the end result that from Reykjavik to the Falkland Islands, bananas can be found just about everywhere humans call home.
Despite its universality, the fruit faces a precarious future; an insidious disease named fusarium wilt (aka Panama disease) has emerged as Banana Enemy #1. Its modus operandi — death by arterial blockage, whereby leaves yellow, and wither and the plant ultimately dies.
Wilt, as the disease is commonly known, is the banana’s old and familiar foe. Starting in the 1920s, a wilt-causing strain of the fusarium fungus, called Race 1, spread across in Latin America, decimating a hundred thousand acres of commercial plantations — all growing the susceptible Gros Michel variety. The search for a resistant banana led to the Cavendish — a banana subgroup with good yield and short growth-cycle. As an added bonus, it looked and tasted like a Gros Michel. By the 1960s, the industry pulled off a seamless switch: Gros Michels were replaced by Cavendish and shoppers were none the wiser. Cavendish cultivation shot up and the world got hooked on bananas more than ever. A crisis was averted … for the time being.
Then a new iteration of the fungus — Tropical Race 4 (TR4)— was discovered in 1990s in Taiwan. Over the last 30 years, it has slowly been making its way around the world. At the last tally, TR4 was confirmed in 19 countries (in December 2019, it appeared in Turkey).
TR4, like Race 1, is a nightmare pathogen — it is indestructible (resists all fungicides) and unstoppable (spreads through infected soil), and once it arrives, it stays in the soil for decades. But the real bad news? Cavendish, today the world’s most popular variety, is highly susceptible to TR4.
TR4 is now considered the greatest threat to bananas around the world. On August 8, 2019, it was officially confirmed in Colombia, marking its arrival in a battle-scarred Latin America whose economy is heavily dependent on banana money. Colombia, in turn, declared a phytosanitary national emergency — deploying biosecurity protocols to safeguard its half million hectares under banana cultivation. After all, it takes little for a TR4 epidemic; the fungus can hitch a ride to new frontiers on the sole of a peregrinating shoe, or on circulating farm equipment.
Considering that Cavendish varieties — Grand Naine, Dwarf Cavendish, and Robusta — make up nearly half the world’s bananas, including 95% of the exported ones and the fact that virtually no one in North America or the EU has ever tasted a banana that isn’t a Cavendish — a fatalistic narrative has dominated media reports on the TR4 crisis. A sinister (but admittedly catchy) portmanteau, ‘Bananageddon' was coined. “Bye Bye, Bananas”, one news headline warned.
Not quite.
The Cavendish narrative is but one facet of the banana’s story. The fruit is grown, sold and eaten in radically different ways around the world. And as it turns out, the world knows two types of bananas…
One is the “big industry” export banana — trademarked, pampered, and anthropomorphised. Its journey begins in the sprawling monocultures of Latin America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia and it culminates in supermarkets across the United States, Europe and China. Sameness and conformity are its highest virtues. In the 1900s, this export banana was Gros Michel. Today, it is the Cavendish. And with TR4 on its heels, the search is on for tomorrow’s variety.
The other is the folk banana — a centrepiece of a place’s food culture, eaten as a staple, with supply chains often no more than a few miles long. It’s the banana of Papua New Guinea, a hot spot of diversity, where street vendors carry varieties with startling silhouettes and colors. It’s the banana of conflict-ridden African nations, where 100 million people subsist on it as their primary source of carbs — the banana that Dan Koeppel, author of the monograph Banana: Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, called “peacekeeper”.
The future of bananas depends on these two disparate worlds coming together, and one place primed for such a convergence is India — the world’s largest producer of bananas. India is a unique microcosm, one where the fruit reckons with its 2000-year history even as it awaits an industry makeover.
Banana Land
In the heartland of South India’s banana country is Tiruchirappalli (Trichy) — a town with an unmistakeable 90s-era vibrancy framed in its sprawling temples, dusty roads, and “high-class” restaurants. A short way off its central market is the bustling wholesale banana mandi — a sampling of India’s Rs 50,000 crore ($7 billion) domestic banana industry.
Every morning, farmers truck in around 25 tonnes of unripe bananas from surrounding plantations (supply varies day-to-day, quadrupling during the Dusshera festival, when bananas are offered to temple gods) and by noon, the bunches are auctioned off to traders. A rough-and-ready spirit pervades: men in dhotis haul bunches onto pushcarts, trucks, and auto rickshaws; a few cows linger for overripe throwaways; some bunches are shuffled into dark chambers with hobbit-sized doors for ripening overnight; everybody’s hands are stained black with banana goo.
For much of the day, the mandi is a swell of bananas: some slender and spindle-shaped; some short and stout; some with waxy magenta peels; and some so tiny, you could eat one entirely in a single gulp. They have names like Nendran, Chandrabale, Yelakki, Poovan and Rasthali. Here, Cavendish is no overlord; just another player.
India’s banana economy may be seen as a chaotic counterpoint to the über-industrialised supply chains of Big Banana companies like Dole and Chiquita that dominate the export trade in the West. But given the latter’s notorious fondness for a single variety, India’s decentralised markets have allowed banana diversity to flourish — around 20 commercial, and 40+ local varieties survive. The fruit itself is consumed in eclectic ways — as chips, flour, and wine. And the entire plant gets used: the flowers are pickled, the stems are curried, and the leaves are used as disposable plates.
India’s star seemed ever-ascending: productivity doubled in the last two decades and the area under banana cultivation increased four-fold. The National Research Center for Banana (NRCB), India’s banana mecca (also located in Trichy), laid out lofty 2050 vision goals. The country was also pushing for a bigger piece of the export pie (India produces a third of the world’s bananas, but it makes up less than 0.1% of the export market).
But the mood has shifted subtly since TR4 was officially confirmed in northern regions of India in early 2018; It being a long way off from core banana-producing districts in central and south India is little consolation — feeble containment measures, inadequate farmer awareness, and small farm sizes (average of 2–3 acres) all but guarantees the spread of the fungus.
The worst aspect of TR4 is also perhaps its least explored — its ruinous impact on diversity. By some estimates, more than 80% of the world’s banana varieties are susceptible to TR4 to varying degrees.
In India, TR4 could radically alter the landscape of bananas. Out of 410 distinct banana varieties tested by NRCB (samples derived from its entire gene bank), less than 20 survived the fungus. Most of the survivors were primitive varieties — not the creamy, dessert bananas of the modern world. None of the commercial varieties were found to be resistant.
The solution to TR4 is to create resistant bananas — an undertaking that seems straightforward, but famously isn’t.
Finding Hope in the Lab
Conventional banana breeding is an exercise in patience and grit. Phil Rowe, the world-renowned banana breeder, explained it as “having to work with a plant that has no seeds, to get it to produce seeds, in order to develop a plant with no seeds”. Rowe’s most famous creation as head of the premier breeding program at Honduran Agricultural Research Foundation (FHIA) was the Goldfinger banana, and it took 25 years to create.
To dial up breeding, scientists have turned to genetic engineering. Precise genetic tools, like CRISPR, have also afforded a chance to ‘fix’ the Cavendish, rather than replace it with new hybrids. In 2017, scientists at Queensland University of Technology announced a breakthrough — a TR4-resistant Cavendish created with genes borrowed from a wild banana.
In India, genetically modified (GM) bananas may not mean much. GM crops coming out of research labs get mired in multiyear tugs-of-war between the country’s biotech regulatory body, environment ministry, and anti-GM advocacy groups. Lawlessness prevails — instances of unapproved GM crops turning up in commercial farms have resulted in a miasma of public mistrust around the entire subject.
Halfway between conventional breeding (slow, but standard) and gene modification (fast, but fraught), is mutation breeding. Where plant embryos are irradiated with Gamma rays to introduce random genetic variations. India has used this technique to create more than forty new high-yield varieties of crops, including groundnut, rice and wheat. NRCB’s mutation effort produced fifty viable, TR4-resistant varieties from a pool of 30,000 mutated banana embryos. Large-scale fields trials for these are underway.
Sometimes though, creating new varieties is matter of happenstance. Modern seedless bananas of a given variety are all genetic clones (my Cavendish is the same as your Cavendish, same as the Queen of England’s — even if she eats hers with a knife and fork). But on occasion, a genetic variation may arise spontaneously. One such variation transformed a low-yield, TR4-susceptible banana variety procured by NRCB to a high-yield plant that was also resistant to TR4. The new variety, Kaveri Sugantham (named after its fragrance), was released to farmers in early 2019.
“Bananas are not dying,” an NRCB scientist emphasises, before adding — “but people should be open to new varieties.”
A Case for Diversity
New banana varieties may pose a challenge for consumer acceptance. In India where diversity holds cultural cachet, embracing the unfamiliar is a short-order ask. For a palate that has savoured the honeyed sweetness of a karpuravalli, or the zippy acidity of a poovan, the Cavendish seems to evoke little gastronomic delight. The owner of the famed Theobroma Bakery in Mumbai lamented the declining taste of her banana cakes, saying, “the bananas she gets now” (referring to the tidal wave of Grand Naine in Mumbai’s markets) had “absolutely zero flavour.”
But for much of the export banana world, weaned exclusively on Cavendish, a recalibration of taste is necessary. The Goldfinger — a cold-tolerant, wind-tolerant, disease-tolerant and, most importantly, TR4-resistant hybrid was bred to be a Cavendish successor. But it was rejected in consumer tests because of its unfamiliar tart notes. Dan Koeppel describes this entrenchment with this rhetoric: “If it doesn’t taste like the Cavendish, does that mean it also doesn’t taste like a banana?”
What began as a case of right place, right time for the Cavendish in the 1950s, has today turned into a commanding lead over the world’s 1,500+ documented banana varieties. In international markets, the Cavendish is the banana. Cavendish monocultures are the norm.
Even in India, the last two decades have seen a steep rise in Cavendish — it now accounts for 65% of the area under banana cultivation in the country. The dry district of Jalgaon in Maharashtra is its unlikely poster child. Aided by drip irrigation and a relentless drive for superlative yields, Jalgaon has broken Cavendish yield records. Here, “Banana Life-Time Achievement Awards” are handed out for banana fingers as long as forearms. A nouveau riche banana class has emerged, echoing the vanilla boom of Madagascar — in which farmers and wheeler-dealers became very rich, very fast — prompting one banana scientist to quip: “Those guys don’t build houses. They build castles.”
That’s the allure of monocultures — When things go well, they go exceedingly well. A farm-to-market operation hums along with the predictability of an iPhone assembly line. Pesticide cocktails, harvesting machinery specs, packinghouse tools, shipping crates, ripening schedules— all latch on to the precise shape, size, taste and quirks of a single banana type. A fruit can be turned into a commodity.
“There is nothing wrong with having a commodity banana” says Dan Koeppel, “but to have that be the only banana …it’s foolish socially and economically.” Because if things go sideways — like the arrival of an incurable disease like TR4 — a monoculture of clones topples like a million dominoes.
“It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness”
History’s cautionary tale, the Great Famine that wiped out an eighth of Ireland’s population was, amongst other factors, brought on by an over-dependence on a single potato variety — the lumper— that was highly susceptible to a ravenous blight.
A fitting parallel to the banana crisis comes from the coffee world. In the late 19th century, the coffee rust fungus dealt a death blow to coffee industries in Southeast Asian countries like Sri Lanka and the Philippines. But Colombia pioneered a tactic to combat the fungus — planting an ever-shifting mix of new, resistant varieties. As the fungus evolved, some varieties succumbed, but some endured. Today, the Colombian model of diversification is widely praised, and it has been replicated in other coffee-growing countries.
As pathogens like TR4, coffee rust, and potato blight pop up, the fragility of monocultures is increasingly obvious. Diversity in a farm is seen a common sense insurance policy — a hedge against worst-case scenarios.
Banana X
The multibillion-dollar question about the future of bananas is humanity’s long-term vision for the fruit — not just this immediate TR4 issue. On the international stage, bananas occupy an undersized berth in the fruit aisle despite their obvious appeal. Apples, even on bad days, show up as three or four varieties, each with its unique taste and texture — Gala, Pink Lady, Fuji. Avocados — virtually unknown in the East a decade ago — are flooding markets in assorted varieties.
But so far, there is little indication of a change of heart in the export banana industry, which frames TR4 as a “Cavendish replacement” problem rather than a diversification problem, shifting the onus to the lab to breed “perfect” bananas. Koeppel compared the banana industry to jackpot winners who got incredibly lucky once and “won all the money in the world” and now “want to play the same hand hoping lighting strikes a second and third time.”
But India is well placed to pioneer a new model for bananas of the future. Already, domestic supply chains have diversity built-in: some urban supermarkets sell at least three varieties of bananas; farmers, too have shown a willingness to adapt. (In 2012, when Cavendish plantations in South India’s Theni district were affected by disease, farmers shifted to growing red bananas, markets adjusted by dropping rates, and consumers found a way to put away the fruit.)
The real challenge lies in disrupting the export market to make space for multiple varieties. In 2017, under an initiative led by NRCB and the Indian government’s export promotion branch, a batch of Nendrans (a popular variety used in making banana chips ) left Kochi on a 12-day journey to Dubai. It was a significant milestone, marking the first of many sea-based exports of non-Cavendish bananas. But more importantly, it suggests a future where, by setting up protocols and facilities for harvesting, packing houses, transport and ripening, new banana varieties can find their way to far-flung shopping carts.
When it comes to creating a banana for tomorrow, the truth is this : no one banana variety will be tasty, shippable, climate-hardy, and resistant to all current and future disease. “Forever Perfect Banana™” is fiction. Seamlessly swapping out the Cavendish with a single TR4-resistant variety, say, Banana X, is a vain task, because the spectre of a new disease always looms over monoculture-lined horizons.
Banana X — the banana of the future — is not one banana, but many. A win-win situation for industry disruptors, for consumers and, of course…for the fruit.
