Yes, We Will Have No Bananas

Bananas are all over the place now, and they're cheap. Bananas have been the hottest selling item for Wal-Mart for years. Bananas are the world's most popular fruit and fourth most important food crop. Bananas are toast.

Fruits like bananas, and other foodstuffs like maize and potatoes, come in many varieties, and Indigenous peoples bred even more varieties. But Euroamerican capitalists applied the magic of the marketplace to them: they selected one variety that was easy to mass produce, bred for that, grew it in abundance, marketed the hell out of it and destroyed the habitat of all the rest. Native people thought they were crazy, not for the first or last time.

Now the one surviving variety of banana, the Cavendish, is in deep trouble, threatened by a pandemic that could wipe it out. Genetically modifying it in the hopes of creating a resistant strain is pretty difficult and time-consuming, and those fruit company scientists may not get it done in time. Bye bye banana.

There are other banana species in India (where the Cavendish comes from) but rapid industrialization and deforestation is wiping out their habitat. And since Wal-Mart isn't interested in other species, no one else has been. By the time the magic of the marketplace gears up, it may be too late. A tale for our time.

There's a somewhat similiar situation with maize, the world's most widely grown crop. Corn is routinely interbred to keep it viable, but the stockpile of available genes is dwindling, partly because of incompetence in storing seeds, and partly by the lack of variety in the ground. The dominant breeds are getting genetically simpler, and less resistant to disease.

Maybe when bananas and other foods vanish forever, along with the varieties of fish that have already quietly disappeared, the stupidity of relying solely on the corporate marketplace for all values governing our societies--putting all our eggs, as it were, in one basket-- will finally sink in.