Bye Bye Bananas
Bye Bye Bananas
A few years ago I read an article in a newspaper or online that said that bananas were doomed.
We are well into the ten year period that particular story described for the doom. What would we see in the stores if this were to be true?
We might first expect the price one pays for bananas to sky rocket in price. We might also expect the availability to diminish and become almost unavailable.
So where are we today?
Well, let’s see… “The price of bananas has increased”, but, no excessive increase in price. We can also see that over-all the banana market and availability has not been missing from store shelves either.
With north Americans eating more bananas than apples, bananas have become our favorite fruit. So much so that a study has concluded that we will eat around 10-12,000 bananas before reaching age 40.
So were the reports of the bananas demise greatly exaggerated? Probably not.
A report out of Uganda a few weeks back had a headline of “Bananas now an endangered species”. The account went on to say that, the disease first discovered in Uganda back in 2001, called The Banana Bacterial Wilt or BBW. Poses a major threat to the banana production and to their farmers too
Unless a cure can be found, it is feared that bananas could become extinct.
Bananas represent a large cash crop for the farmers and the people who depend upon the banana crop for their livelihood and both humans and animals rely on as a staple diet.
The blight has also been found according to the news item Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Indonesia. North America get most of their bananas from central America, which so far has not been hard hit yet.
The brand or types of bananas we eat are the Cavendish type and worldwide we eat about a hundred billion bananas a year. Because bananas are genetically identical having come from plants, what can affect one type of banana can affect them all.
The report also says that those bananas we eat today are not the same variety our grand-parents or parents ate back in the 1960’s. In those day apparently the variety name was Gros Michel.
They also say that the Gros Michel had a better flavor. Of course that today is subject to the people who have actually eaten both varieties. I have eaten bananas in Africa, America, Canada and the UK. I have to say that as far as my memory goes the best bananas I ever ate were the ones fresh from the trees in Africa.
Posted in Start a Bakery
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