The Double Mahoi plant can produce two bunches at once. Many of these varieties are known as plantains; they are starchy and inedible until cooked. In , when a Cape Cod fishing-boat captain named Lorenzo Dow Baker imported a hundred and sixty bunches of bananas into Jersey City—the first bananas in the U.
In converting a tropical fruit into a global commodity, United Fruit amassed land across Latin America, from Guatemala to Colombia, replacing virgin jungle with vast tracts of Gros Michels.
Poorly compensated workers, battling malaria, dengue fever, tarantulas, pythons, and jaguars, constructed miles of railroad track, telecommunications lines, and irrigation canals. By the nineteen-sixties, United Fruit controlled nearly seven hundred million acres of land. United Fruit eventually commanded ninety per cent of the American banana market, and in Latin America it became known as El Pulpo—the Octopus. When a head of state tried to thwart its progress, the company often responded with militaristic force.
It clandestinely aided the coup in Honduras and the coup in Guatemala. Early in its ascendancy, United Fruit began contending with crop disease. As the historian John Soluri has pointed out, before United Fruit arrived Latin Americans farmed small, diffuse tracts of land. But as jungle diversity was replaced with monolithic fields of Gros Michels, funguses like Race One were provided with many more hosts.
In the nineteen-forties, a distant rival, Standard Fruit, reacted to the blight by shifting to Cavendish bananas, the Chinese variety, which were growing in the private greenhouse of the Duke of Devonshire, in Chatsworth, England. The bananas proved naturally resistant to Race One. In every other way, however, the Cavendish was less desirable than the Gros Michel. The Cavendish was susceptible to other diseases, which were controllable only with costly pesticides.
It had a tendency to bruise, which meant that, rather than shipping bananas directly on the stalk, Standard Fruit had to box them in elaborate new packing houses. The Cavendish also needed special ripening rooms, where the green bananas, after arriving in the U. When the bananas made it to stores, they lasted only a week before spoiling. And to those who knew the Gros Michel the flavor of the Cavendish was lamentably bland.
In , United Fruit opened a research center in La Lima, Honduras, and hired Phil Rowe, a former rice breeder from Arkansas, to breed the perfect export banana: flavorful, hardy, and disease-resistant.
The company also wanted the new plant to sprout big bunches, and to be sturdy enough to withstand the high winds that occasionally blew through Latin America. Because domesticated bananas are sterile, Rowe was forced to cross wild diploids that offered a grab bag of good and bad traits.
In four decades of work, he grew twenty thousand hybrids, but he never found a replacement for the Cavendish. His leading candidate, called Goldfinger, withstood Race One, but consumers rejected it as acidic and starchy. In the end, the unrelenting capriciousness of his work proved too much. One morning in , Rowe walked into his experimental-banana fields and hanged himself from a tree. United Fruit was stuck growing the Cavendish.
The head banana breeder is a man named Juan Fernando Aguilar, and outside his office hangs a sun-blanched picture of Phil Rowe. Aguilar, a thickset, gregarious Guatemalan, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and glasses with light-sensitive lenses, picked me up one morning at my hotel—the Banana Inn—and gave me a tour of a gated residential community called the Zona Americana.
And two tennis courts! It was very expensive and we got nothing back. For this reason, Chiquita reversed its position in and signed a confidential agreement with FHIA , hiring the center that it once owned to naturally engineer a better banana.
The contract is said to be worth two million dollars. Dole and FHIA are negotiating a similar deal. To look at a woman from afar is not to know the woman. To know her, you must be with her. And to know the hybrids you must be with the hybrids. Once the plants have flowered, at nine months, workers manually dust them with the pollen of another banana plant that has a desirable trait, such as disease resistance.
Three months later, Aguilar harvests the bunches, in the hope that the forced fertilization has impelled the plants to produce seeds. Every Monday, local women peel a hundred thousand bananas.
Two days later, after the bananas have fermented and softened, the women smash them on a sieve, let the pulp ooze through, and retrieve any seeds. On average, Aguilar recovers one seed from every ten thousand bananas—about ten seeds a week. But even if that plant acquires the trait of blight resistance, it will likely pick up several other, less desirable attributes, such as a low yield of fruit.
One round of this exercise lasts three years. A well planned plantation incorporates good soil types, safe all-weather access, row design to suit typographic conditions, irrigation design, plant spacings, and specialised erosion control and drainage structures. From the time of planting it usually takes 12 months or so to produce the first bunch of bananas, with subsequent bunches every months thereafter. A bunch averages to bananas and weighs approximately kilograms.
When the bunch is harvested, the parent or mother plants trunk is cut through at about head height. The section of trunk that's left standing nourishes the young 'sucker' plants that grow at its base. These plants go on to produce their own bunches.
The top part of the mother plants trunk becomes organic plantation matter. Biosecurity planning provides a mechanism for the banana industry, government and other relevant stakeholders to assess current biosecurity practices and future biosecurity needs. Planning identifies procedures that can be put in place to reduce the chance of pests reaching our borders or minimise the impact if a pest incursion occurs. The Biosecurity Plan for the Banana Industry outlines key threats to the industry, risk mitigation plans, identification and categorisation of exotic pests and contingency plans.
For a copy, please contact PHA on 02 or email [email protected]. The guide is in two sections:. The Banana Best Management Practices: On-farm Biosecurity manual was designed to help growers implement biosecurity practices.
More information about on-farm biosecurity for both plant and livestock producers is available from the Farm Biosecurity website. Promotional item to support the exotic plant pest hotline For printed copies of this material, please contact PHA. The following is a list of high priority exotic pests of bananas. These pests were identified during the development of the Industry Biosecurity Plan for the Banana Industry in consultation with industry, government and scientists.
They have been assessed as high priority pests based on their potential to enter, establish, and spread in Australia eg environmental factors, host range, vectors and the cost to industry of control measures. PHA has a range of fact sheets, contingency plans and diagnostic protocols relevant to these pests. Pest risk review documents are also available for some pests. Please contact PHA on 02 or email [email protected] for more information.
The following is a list of documents for other exotic and endemic pests of the banana industry. Please note that this is not a complete list of pests: rather it includes pests for which documents exist in the Pest Information Document Database.
Some of the documents presented here are not tailored to the banana industry and are included for information only. Their responsibilities include: biosecurity planning and implementation at the national and farm levels liaising with federal and state governments on trade issues funding and supporting biosecurity initiatives participating in national committees and response efforts in an emergency. In there continues to be two major biosecurity threats challenging the banana industry: Panama disease tropical race 4 Panama TR4 in north Queensland banana bunchy top virus in northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland.
Banana bunchy top virus A control program for banana bunchy top virus has been operating in New South Wales and south-east Queensland since Good article here Malcolm thanks.
Nice collection you have there Jeff too btw. Hi Malcolm, Really enjoyed your article about wild bananas. I have recently been interested in heirloom plants and their origins. I was wondering if you might know where I might be able to buy the seeds of either banksii or jackeyi? Kind regards Daniel.
Hi, Daniel, Glad you liked the article. Good luck! Yuruga nursery once sold one of the native ones, but not for many, many years much to my disappointment. Had my hands on a native one but it ended up not surviving its second winter in Sydney. In the Philippines, there is a banana that when it is ripe the skin is light green and the banana tastes wonderful.
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