Disease

Banana Apocalypse?

Eat all the bananas you can now because soon, there won’t be any left. And it won’t be because you ate them all. It’ll be because they’ve gone extinct. A new study in PLOS Pathogens claims that a virus named Tropical Race 4 is about to kickstart the bananapocalypse.

In what must be the worst case of deja vu in food history, this projected banana extinction is actually the second to happen in this century. In the 1960s, the Gros Michel variety of bananas were all the rage, until disaster struck. Panama disease, caused by Tropical Race, essentially wiped out the entire crop of the Gros Michel.

The death of the Gros Michel led to the rise in popularity of today’s Cavendish banana, which was resistant to the old version of the Panama disease virus. While the Cavendish may have been able to survive the previous round of wipeouts, it is susceptible to the new Tropical Race 4 strain currently making its way around the world.

Today’s bananas have been cultivated as a monoculture — all bananas are genetically identical because they’ve been grown as a seedless variety, which means that when one gets sick, they all get sick. Worse yet, the virus, which kills essentially by dehydrating the plant’s root system, can stay in the soil for 30 years.