- Similar to humans,
bananas are facing a pandemic. - Nearly all of the bananas sold globally are just one kind called the
Cavendish , which is susceptible to a deadly fungus called Tropical Race 4, orPanama Disease . - If not stopped, Tropical Race 4 could wipe out the $25 billion
banana industry .
Following is a transcription of the
Narrator: The world's most popular banana may be on the verge of extinction.
Fernando: Similar to humans, bananas are also facing a pandemic.
Narrator: Ninety-nine percent of bananas exported to developed countries are just one group called the Cavendish. And the Cavendish is vulnerable to Tropical Race 4, or Panama disease, a fungus that's now ravaging banana farms across the globe.
Fernando: So now you can compare, this is Tropical Race 4 in a
Narrator: One scientist recently developed a line of Cavendish that is resistant to TR4, but it was genetically modified.
Fernando: In Europe, the GMs are under regulation, so we cannot use it.
Narrator: So scientists like Fernando had to start from scratch to find a solution. And they're working against the clock. Because if TR4 is not stopped …
James: It would wipe out Cavendish.
Narrator: And it's already happening.
Antonio: This is an area of contagion. About 500 plants have been uprooted. There is no silver bullet. You have to attack it on different fronts because there is no other way to contain it or limit its spread.
Narrator: Globally, we're facing the collapse of a $25 billion Cavendish industry. So how did we get here? And can we save one of the world's most consumed fruits before it's too late?
You probably know the Cavendish banana.
Fernando: You can find this type of banana in every supermarket around the world.
Narrator: They're so popular because they're yummy, they look nice, and they ripen as they transport.
James: It's high-yielding, so it's got quite a thick skin, and so it travels well and tastes pretty good. It comes in its own package.
Narrator: But there's a problem.
Fernando: They are sterile. They don't have seeds.
Narrator: No seeds means Cavendish bananas are clones of each other. So the only way to propagate them is in vitro or by taking new growths, called suckers, from the base of an older plant. But since they're all genetic copies, Cavendish are really vulnerable to disease.
Fernando: The domino effect. If you have everything wrong with just one clone, one disease can kill everything, plant by plant.
Narrator: That's exactly what's happening with TR4, one of the deadliest plant diseases out there. The fungus doesn't spread to humans, but it does eventually kill the banana plant so no more fruit grows.
Scientists guess the fungus probably started somewhere in Southeast Asia in the '90s and quickly spread across the globe. Then in 2019, it hit Latin America. Combined with the Caribbean, that area grows 75% of the world's bananas.
Jose: At first it was somewhat of a shock because Fusarium wasn't even close to our continent, and all of a sudden it appears in our province of La Guajira, one of the most important places in Colombia for banana production.
Narrator: To make sure the fungus doesn't spread, farms across Colombia have implemented biosecurity measures. Eva Norte 2 was one of the first farms in the country to detect TR4. Workers wash down and disinfect the underside of any car that comes in, just in case there's infected soil hiding in the treads.
Antonio: Anything that we are wearing that is in contact with soil can become a way to transfer the fungus. Workers leave their shoes here. They turn around and put on an overall and put on the rubber boots with which they will enter the farm. Here on the left we consider this the dirty zone, and on this side is the clean zone. It's the clean zone because it is disinfected, it is controlled as you go in and out of the farm.
Narrator: Antonio's team built cement paths throughout the farm. So on their way to harvest, workers aren't walking on open soil.
Antonio: And we have seen that the cement paths can drastically reduce the amount of soil that sticks to our boots.
Narrator: Once they've reached the area ready to be harvested, workers walk through a sanitizing foot bath made of ammonium.
Antonio: We have a footbath for every 35 to 40 hectares of the farm. Where there is an outbreak, we place additional footbaths to cover the entrance and the exit to those areas with outbreaks.
Narrator: Out in the field, Workers measure the banana fingers to make sure they're ready to harvest. They're usually ready about 12 to 13 weeks after the fruit stem shows up. One worker cuts down a 65-pound bundle while the other catches it and carries it to the cableway.
That cableway system brings all those banana bunches to the packaging plant. First, workers sanitize the bunches with chlorine.
Antonio: In order to remove any insects that could still be there, like spiders.
Narrator: Then they check the bananas for quality and any signs of Fusarium damage. They cut off and throw bushels into a huge tank. That bath not only preserves the bananas, but washes off any of the latex that naturally occurs on the peel. The bananas get cut into smaller bunches of five to seven.
Antonio: After that, we put a liquid on the crowns of the banana bunches, which helps to protect them during their boat journey.
Narrator: Next come those famous stickers.
Antonio: We weigh each tray and then pack them into boxes. We weigh each tray and then pack them into boxes.
Narrator: Workers wrap the banana carefully so they don't bruise. That wrapping has holes in it so the bananas can ripen as they travel. No more than four hours after the bananas are harvested, those boxes end up on pallets loaded onto trucks.
Antonio: In this case, we have an order of 960 boxes of 3 pounds each, and 960 boxes for Walmart.
Narrator: The bananas are trucked to the nearby port, where they're moved onto ships. This shipment's headed to the US. With equipment, bananas, and people moving along this global supply chain, it's easy to see how the fungus could spread.
If TR4 does sneak into a farm, the Colombian government has laid out strict guidelines for containing the fungus.
Antonio: We had an intervention here in week 26 of 2019. This was the second case [of Fusarium] in the Eva Norte 2 farm.
Narrator: That means they found symptoms like ...
Fernando: The yellowing of the leaves. The splitting of the stem.
Narrator: Once TR4 is identified in a plant, you can't just kill that one plant. The fungus goes about 10 feet deep into the soil.
Fernando: Once the pathogen is in the soil, it's almost impossible to eradicate.
Narrator: So you have to kill off all the plants in that area.
Antonio: We have had to eradicate 137 hectares of productive land. Those were the plants that were removed because of that one plant that was showing Fusarium symptoms.
Narrator: To keep operating the rest of the farm, Eva Norte 2 followed the government's three-zone plan.
Antonio: In A, which is the red zone, the zone closest to the plant with symptoms, soil is injected.
Narrator: The injected herbicide kills all the plants in Zone A.
Antonio: On top of that, we add some urea to the soil and cover it with a tarp.
Narrator: That tarp's so birds won't land on the fungus and spread it around. There are also canals around the zone to keep any water away from the infected area. In Zone B, called the buffer zone ...
Antonio: Plants are also injected so that we have a barrier between the affected area and the area that is being harvested.
Narrator: Finally, in Zone C, plants are allowed to grow, but they're constantly monitored for signs of TR4.
Jose estimates biosecurity has cost this farm as much as $5 million since 2019. So they're pricey, but the measures are working at keeping the fungus at bay.
Jose: We have managed to contain it. The provinces of Magdalena and Cesar are free of Tropical Race 4 Fusarium at this moment.
Antonio: There has been no decrease in productivity up to now.
Narrator: These biosecurity measures have contained the fungus in Colombia and kept it from spreading to Ecuador, the largest exporter of bananas in the world. But fungus can wipe out an entire fruit variety if not stopped. We know because it's happened before.
In the early 1900s, a banana called Gros Michel was the most popular. But by the 1950s ...
Fernando: One strain of the Panama disease wiped out the whole production of Gros Michel.
Narrator: Luckily, Cavendish was resistant to that first strain. So it took over as the banana of choice. The problem was banana companies built their entire supply chains around this one Cavendish variety. In 2019, they exported 20 million bananas and supported millions of jobs globally. But now, the Cavendish is also vulnerable.
Fernando: History repeats itself now with a Tropical Race 4 and the Cavendish.
Narrator: Cooking bananas like plantains are also at risk for TR4.
Fernando: A risk for food security, because the plantains are a staple food in Latin America, in Africa, and many other countries. They are part of our daily diet.
Narrator: So yeah, the newest race of Fusarium is scary for both Cavendish and plantains. But this time around, we have advanced
Antonio: The idea is to find plants that will resist Tropical Race 4.
Narrator: This guy actually invented a banana that did just that. Back in 2019, Dr. James Dale announced that his team had successfully injected the DNA from a resistant banana into a Cavendish. And it worked.
James: We found the solution in the line of Cavendish which appears to be completely resistant to TR4. The thing we haven't done yet is a taste test. And that's because they're GM. They look, smell, feel exactly the same as every other, but we've only changed one gene.
Narrator: But no one would buy his miracle banana because it was genetically modified.
Jose: At an international level, genetically modified varieties are not a solution. Whether it is the final consumer or the distributor, those that buy fruit don't accept them.
Narrator: In the EU, most member countries have either partly or fully banned GMOs. In the US, they're allowed but feared. One argument against GMOs is that these modified plants would quickly spread their genes and kill out biodiversity. But with bananas, that's not a problem.
James: The genes don't move because they are sterile. You can grow a GM banana next to a non GM banana for 50 years and the gene will not move from under the other. Incredibly frustrating. There's a solution, but it's a scientific solution, but not a political solution.
Narrator: So scientists had to go back to the drawing board, using what they learned from James to play the non-GMO game. Fernando is a breeder for KeyGene, a genetics company in the Netherlands. And he thinks the best way to get around GMO regulations is through traditional breeding, meaning you take two different types of bananas - the Cavendish and one that is resistant - and you essentially have them mate. And their kid is hopefully resistant to Panama disease, but still tastes good like Cavendish.
Fernando: Crossbreeding, or traditional breeding, is something that happens every day in nature. So the bees are pollinating the different flowers with other flowers. So that's what we are doing here. We are acting as bees.
Narrator: Fernando has found a few resistant bananas to cross with Cavendish, but ...
Fernando: Most of them are not even edible bananas, they are bananas that are full of seeds, like this one.
Narrator: And to cross those with a Cavendish is hard.
Fernando: They are sterile, very difficult to breed. It's not impossible. So you can try to cross, but you need to do it many, many, many times to get only a few seeds.
Narrator: For James to make that first GMO banana, it took him ...
James: Nearly 10 years since our first field trial.
Narrator: For those future bananas that are traditionally bred, it'll take just as long.
Fernando: It will take lots of years because the life cycle of the banana is quite slow.
Narrator: But the longer it takes to traditionally breed a resistant Cavendish, the more the disease spreads. And the more strains of Fusarium could be released. Fernando says there's a bigger-picture way to attack this problem: diversity. Take tomatoes for example. You go to the grocery store, and there may be 10 or more different types of tomatoes: cherry, vine, beef, Roma. That's diversity. So if one tomato gets in trouble, it won't be a huge loss. Fernando and his colleagues have the same vision for bananas.
Fernando: We have red bananas, pink bananas. Why not try to incorporate that into the market so that you can go to the supermarket and have a complete bench of different options of bananas that you can choose.
James: There are hundreds of different banana varieties around the world. A friend of mine collected one up in Papua New Guinea that he said, if you didn't know it, you think you're eating a strawberry. Yeah. So amazingly different flavors.
Narrator: And diversity would also help farms.
Fernando: But if you have different types of bananas grown together, probably one banana will be more resistant than the next one. So that one can stop the spreading of the disease to the next plant.
Narrator: So why haven't companies diversified? Because it's too expensive and complicated to change a $25 billion industry built around a monoculture. So until a solution is found, these biosecurity measures will have to be the short-term fix for keeping the
Jose: There is life before and after Fusarium. It also made us open our eyes about many needs the industry had that we were not addressing.