Can GM stop blight that risks wiping out bananas?
FROM a single plant grown at Chatsworth in the 1830s, the Cavendish banana has spread to become the ubiquitous variety of banana on our supermarket shelves.
But it is facing extinction from a deadly fungus – and may have to be genetically engineered into a new variant if the fruit is not to be wiped out altogether, experts say.
The majority of bananas consumed in the West are thought to be descended from one plant imported to England from Mauritius in 1830 and grown in the hothouse at Chatsworth House in the Peak District. Chatsworth’s gardener was apparently inspired by a depiction of the plant on wallpaper. Mission- aries later exported the Cavendish banana to Samoa and the Canary Islands, starting new banana industries.
However, the Cavendish only became the most popular type of banana after the previously dominant Gros Michel, which was said to be tastier, was virtually wiped out by a deadly fungus known as “Panama disease” or “banana wilt” in the Fifties.
Farmers took up growing the Cavendish, which was immune to the fungus. But a new strain of the fungal disease that affects the Cavendish has developed and spread in recent years.
It has already spread across South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Australia and scientists have said it is inevitable that sooner or later it will reach the Americas where most of the Cavendish crops are grown.
This time, scientists say, there is no immune variant waiting in the wings to replace the Cavendish.
Dr Gert Kema, of the Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands, told the BBC: “It is necessary that we improve the Cavendish through genetic engineering.”