Have you ever noticed that banana-flavored candy never tastes like the bananas you buy at the grocery store?

This isn’t due to bad flavoring or terrible product development.

The truth is that most banana candy was based on a different banana species — the Gros Michel — which is no longer found in supermarkets.

The Gros Michel may once have been the top banana, but nowadays it’s commercially extinct. And its successor, the Cavendish banana, makes up 99% of exported bananas today.

But, perhaps not for long.

Due to lack of genetic diversity and the rise of disease, the Cavendish banana is currently fighting for its survival with circumstances that are nearly identical to the fall of the Gros Michel banana nearly 70 years ago.

The demise of the Gros Michel banana

Gros Michel Bananas- You might notice they are a different shape than the Cavendish bananas in the supermarket. Image By Zwifree CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70354204

The Gros Michel was the banana of choice throughout the early and mid-nineteen hundreds. By 1950, the variety composed nearly 100% of all exported bananas.

But ten years later, the situation had grossly changed.

A new threat was sweeping through banana farms — Panama Disease — caused by soil-borne fungi that infect the roots of the banana trees. The fungi slowly halts the transportation of water, killing the tree.

Unfortunately, the Gros Michel bananas were extremely susceptible to Panama Disease, and since nearly all bananas cultivated were Gros Michel, the whole crop was easily wiped out.

Not only that, new Gros Michel trees couldn’t be replanted since the fungi remains active in the soil for as long as 20 years.

The Cavendish banana- This is what’s likely sold in your local grocery store. Image by Augustus Binu, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41312905

Here enters our hero — the Cavendish banana — resistant to Panama Disease and staying green for several weeks after being picked, the Cavendish quickly fills the gap left by the Gros Michel variety.

By the 1970s, most farmers had completely switched over to the Cavendish banana. Today, over 50 billion tonnes of Cavendish bananas are grown each year, amounting to a worth of 11 billion dollars.

And the nearly full erasure of the Gros Michel banana was quickly forgotten.

That is, until now.

Panama Disease 4.0

The Cavendish banana was once the golden child, immune to Panama Disease and swooping in to save the banana industry.

But, the newest version of Panama Disease — termed Race 4 — is capable of infecting and killing the once immune Cavendish banana.

We’ve recently learned about this with the COVID virus. As the disease evolved over time, different variants emerged, like delta and omicron.

The same idea applies to plant diseases. As Panama Disease evolved, the fungi changed, and it’s now advanced enough to infect previously immune varieties.

For over two decades, Race 4 was segregated to banana farms in the East, but over time the disease has slowly seeped into Jordan, Oman, Mozambique, Lebanon, and Pakistan. More recently, Pakistan, Laos. Myanmar, and Israel.

The situation has forced scientists to scramble to find a solution and researchers to begin a detailed analysis of the DNA sequences of domesticated and wild bananas.

All with the hope that the genetic material will give clues to help understand the Cavendish banana’s current plight and potential future.

Can science save the banana?

One of the research groups spurred into action was the scientists at The Alliance for Bioversity International in France. The researchers examined the genetic sequences of different banana varieties and scrutinized the current family tree.

Their results reported something quite surprising — there are three missing ancestors in the banana lineage.

Although 75 species and subspecies of banana have been well classified by scientists, none of them are matches for the unknown ancestors.

While it’s very possible that all three of the missing pieces of the banana family tree are extinct, Dr. Julie Sardos has a different opinion:

“But our personal conviction is that they are still living somewhere in the wild, either poorly described by science or not described at all, in which case they are probably threatened.”

Which means the race to find these undiscovered banana cultivars is on.

The search for missing ancestors

What do the researchers hope to gain by finding the lost ancestors?

There are quite a few possibilities ranging from interesting but not helpful to monumental and useful.

For example, identifying the ancestors will provide a fuller picture of how the banana became domesticated and explain the banana diversity we currently have. Basically, it could help us understand the current situation we find ourselves in.

Secondly, and probably more helpful, if these unknown cultivars are located, they may have certain advantageous traits like resistance to disease, which could be cross-bred with our current banana species.

This would be huge considering how little genetic diversity we currently have in bananas, limiting the sources of resistance to Panama Disease.

If there’s a bright side, it’s that the study pinpoints areas where the three ancestors are likely to hail from:

1. In between the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea
2. North Borneo or the Philippines
3. New Guinea

The bad news is that if the species hasn’t already gone extinct, it’s likely to be incredibly threatened.

Are there other options?

With the technology we have today, you might be thinking there has to be another way to save the banana.

And there is, but there’s no clear winner for how to deal with the situation.

Of course, we could try to traditionally breed bananas to create a new variety that has disease resistance but this is very labor intensive, slow work.

Recently, a new hybrid banana took more than two decadesfrom development to getting into farmer’s hands.

We also have the ability to genetically modify bananas, but of course that opens up a whole new set of issues — consumers may be reluctant to accept the new bananas and there could be public pushback.

However, with the current CRISPR technology, it could be relatively easy to either cut out the disease susceptibility genes or add in disease resistance genes. This would immensely speed up the situation compared to traditionally breeding techniques.

So, what would you do to save the banana?

Hang all your hopes on locating those missing ancestors or ground yourself in the technology we have available today?

Let me know in the comments!