‘Bananas to be extinct in 10 yrs’

The doomed banana’s Achilles heel is that it is a genetically decrepit sterile mutant. One of the oldest crops, the first edible variety was propagated about 10,000 years ago from a rare mutant of the wild banana which, with a mass of hard seeds, is virtually inedible.

But, because all edible bananas are sterile — clones of that first plant — they are unable to evolve to fight off new diseases. Black sigatoka, a fungal disease that cuts yields by up to three quarters and reduces the productive lives of banana plants from 30 to only two or three years, has become a global epidemic.

The fungus reduced yields by 40 per cent in a year in Uganda, the world’s second largest producer, and is spreading through the Brazilian Amazon.

Frison, director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain, said black sigatoka was no longer being kept in check. Luadir Gasparotto, Brazil’s leading banana pathologist, said that the production in Brazil, the world’s fourth largest producer, was likely to fall by 70 per cent because of sigatoka. Genetic engineering may be the only answer to save bananas from going extinct.