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DEFENCELESS BANANA ‘WILL BE EXTINCT IN 10 YEARS’

Buy your bananas now. Scientists warn today that the world’s favourite fruit could be extinct within 10 years because it is unable to fight off a rampaging plague of pests and diseases.

Emile Frison, head of a worldwide network of banana researchers, warned that the banana was at crisis point, with yields in decline in much of Africa, Asia and central America. He and other scientists warned that the regions most dependent on the fruit for up to half their daily calories, are facing the tropical equivalent of the Irish potato famine^.

The doomed banana’s Achilles heel is that genetically it is a sterile mutant. One of the oldest crops, the first edible variety was propagated around 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, 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 reduces yields by 40 per cent in a year in Uganda, the world’s second largest producer, and is spreading through the Brazilian Amazon and the Far East.

Mr Frison, director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana, said black sigatoka was no longer kept in check. “As soon as you bring in a new fungicide, it develops resistance,” he said.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, Jan. 16, 2003