The Future of Bananas
James Dale, MHP Books
Over a decade ago, my family and I moved to Townsville, a tropical city in North Queensland, Australia, for a few years. Arguably, the city has one of the most delightful winter climates anywhere: 25°C (77°F) every day for months on end, with cloudless skies and crisp evenings.
A revelation to me was the abundance of fruit and vegetables that could be grown even in a suburban backyard. We planted and harvested papaya and so many winter tomatoes that we had to freeze container after container of the latter.
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But the real king of fecundity was at the back of our quarter-acre: a stand of banana palms that I planted from suckers given to me by a friend.
The palms quickly grew into towering behemoths, then began to produce absolutely giant and phenomenally strange bunches of sugar bananas that seemed to get bigger even as I stood there admiring them.
The first bunch of bananas I harvested was enormous. It was so big that I have a photo of that bunch dwarfing my then 6-year-old daughter.
Ever since, I have been fascinated by bananas, and so was intrigued by a new book, The Future of Bananas, by James Dale ( | ), a leading banana researcher at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.
It is a short book, and I consumed it much like a banana – in a few quick bites, in one sitting.
For decades, alarm has sounded about the threats facing the universally eaten variety known as the Cavendish (Musa acuminata), including here at 91av.
Cavendish may not be the most delicious of the hundreds of the world’s weird and wonderful banana varieties, but it is the most ubiquitous of the Musa world – tough-skinned and tasty, aesthetically pleasing and cheap.
Dale runs through the fascinating history of the Cavendish but, like every banana variety that has ever existed, hot on its tail has been fungal disease. In response to the cat-and-mouse games played by various killer fungi, including strains of the Fusarium banana-killing fungus, humanity has spent centuries working to assist the fruit in outrunning its pathogenic adversaries.
The immense effort farmers and scientists have put into guaranteeing the supply of bananas is a testament to how much we value them as a globally important commodity – and to how much we want to protect what is one of the world’s favourite fruits.
However, it now seems that Cavendish bananas – seedless, clonal and therefore unable to breed themselves out of danger – can no longer outrun the TR4 strain of fungal disease without a serious scientific leg-up.
“Cavendish doomsday is coming,” writes Dale. He says that there are no suitable resistant strains that could possibly replace the variety and that a new banana, fit for all the threats that climate change and disease will throw at it, must be created.
In 2024, Dale and his colleagues gained approval from regulators in Australia and New Zealand to commercially release a genetically modified Cavendish, the QCAV-4, which they had engineered to be resistant to the TR4 strain.
But now, argues Dale, we need to go further, as conventional methods are too slow to prevent an eventual and catastrophic failure of banana crops worldwide.
At the centre of this book is an impassioned plea to overcome a widespread distrust of genetic engineering among the public and use technology not just to save the Cavendish, but also to bring other banana varieties, with their colours – try red and blue, for starters – tastes and health benefits, to our fruit bowls.
This isn’t a tale of romantic pastoralism, but a detailed and, at times, technical plea for the acceptance of scientific agriculture, told by an impassioned expert who knows more about bananas than maybe anyone else.
