Branded the 'HIV of Banana Plantations,' Could a Fungus Wipe Out Bananas?

The Cavendish banana is the species of banana that makes up 99 percent of our banana imports, most of which originate in Latin America. It's the only banana with a sturdy enough skin to travel the distance to get to the United States from such far distances and it's one of the few bananas that stays good for long enough to please customers once it has made its journey.

We depend on a mass produced crop of bananas to keep costs low. Even the organic variety comes in at well under $1 a pound. But according to a story in the New Yorker, scientists fear a fungus, which already wiped out much of the crop in Malaysia and Indonesia, could do the same to our main source of bananas, Latin America. Americans import 7.6 billion pounds of Cavendish bananas a year from Latin America.

The fungus, which has been called the 'HIV of Banana Plantations,' is called Tropical Race Four and it's a soil-borne fungus. Sick plants smell like garbage and slump over lifelessly. The Cavendish is a monoculture plant which like most monocultures can keep costs low initially, but when the crop is destroyed, well, as the New Yorker put it so eloquently, "We have no bananas."