 |
| That's no banana . . . |
. . . we have no bananas today.
The UK Independent reports here on a fungus which threatens to devastate worldwide Cavendish banana production, a major food source for hundreds of millions of people, including smoothie lovers everywhere:
Since it emerged in the 1950s as the replacement for another banana variety ravaged by an earlier form of Panama disease, Cavendish has helped make bananas the most valuable fruit crop in the world, dominated by large multinational growing companies such as Fyffes, Chiquita and Dole.
But the crop – and many other banana varieties – have no defence against TR4, which can live for 30 years or more in the soil and reduces the core of the banana plant to a blackened mush.
