[Southern California Permaculture] the trouble with bananas

[John Calvert]

/"The most common banana subgroup — the Cavendish, which makes up most of the global market — is under assault from insect infestations, declining soil fertility and climate change."/

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Sanderson Bellamy, on the other hand, believes that if we're going to create long-term change, we need to modify the way we farm. "It's been 70 years [since the first fusarium wilt outbreak] and we still haven't come up with a new variety that could tick all these boxes," she said. "The root cause of the problem is the way we're growing bananas."

Solving that problem would mean switching monoculture for smaller farms that are integrated with a diversity of crops, she said. These richer agricultural tapestries would be more resilient to pathogens that favor a singular crop for their spread, and would require fewer pesticides. She believes that there's a lesson to take from the Cavendish calamity for our increasingly unsustainable agricultural system as a whole. "I think there is a crisis in our food system, and I think the [Cavendish] banana is a good example of the way that crisis is manifesting itself," Sanderson Bellamy said.

Changing the way we farm bananas would inevitably mean that we'd grow fewer of them, and that they'd probably be more expensive, she added. But maybe that's where part of the solution lies: getting consumers to realize that the ubiquity and affordability of this favored fruit is really just the product of a flawed system - and that we might need to adapt to a future where we pay for a more sustainable product. "I don't think the price of bananas reflects what it costs to grow these fruits," Sanderson Bellamy said.

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https://www.livescience.com/65830-will-bananas-go-extinct.html

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