Any banana you eat today is probably a clone. You may have noticed it doesn’t have seeds. And that’s because nearly every banana sold globally is a genetic copy of a single variety: the Cavendish.
The vast majority of bananas sold nowadays are Cavendish, a single variety that accounts for over 90% of the global export market. The Cavendish rose to dominance not because it was the most delicious, but because its predecessor, the Gros Michel or “Big Mike,” was wiped out by a virulent fungus called Panama disease. The industry pivoted to the resilient Cavendish to survive. This created a vast but very fragile monoculture — because every Cavendish banana is genetically identical.
Today, a new strain of that same Panama disease, Tropical Race 4 (TR4), is spreading across the globe, and the Cavendish has no natural defense against that. But the Cavendish has another, far more mundane, problem: it easily turns brown.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member