Are bananas going extinct?

Claim: Bananas will be extinct within ten years. WHAT'S FALSE: Bananas are in danger of going extinct in the near future. WHAT'S TRUE: The most popular form of banana, the cavendish, is currently threatened by a disease that could wipe it out.

Local radio station reported that bananas as we know them will not be in existence in 5 to 15 years. The bananas has been genetically altered so much that new plants can not be grown as there are no seeds and the existing plants are slowly being destroyed by a parasite. Origins: Once again, the ecological doomsday bell has been set to tolling, this time by folks fearful of the imminent demise of our favorite fruit, the banana.

In January 2003, a report in New Scientist suggested bananas could well disappear within ten years thanks to two blights: black Sigatoka, a leaf fungus, and Panama disease, a soil fungus which attacks the roots of the plant. Bananas aren't about to be swept from the face of the earth by a deadly pestilence poised to wipe them out (and more than ten years has elapsed since that original report, yet bananas are still with us). There are several hundred different varieties of the fruit, and the reported fear applies to only one of them, the Cavendish.

Granted, the Cavendish is our banana of choice and accounts for the overwhelming pronderance of banana exports and purchases, but it isn't the only banana out there. Even if the Cavendish were lost to us, we would still not be singing "Yes, We Have No Bananas." The Cavendish, the banana American consumers are most familiar with, has been threatened in some Asian countries by a strain of fusarium wilt known as Panama Disease or Tropical Race 4 (TR4).

Bananas stand in greater peril from disease and insect damage than the majority of other fruits because they are sterile, seedless mutants. New plants are created from cuttings of existing ones, making them little more than clones of one another. Without the natural diversity resulting from sexual reproduction, bananas continue on generation after generation with the same genetic makeup.

Their inability to mutate and adapt leaves them vulnerable to species-wide disaster, because what fells one of them will prove the undoing of every plant within that particular variety. In the 1960s the Gros Michel, then a hugely popular variety of banana, was wiped out by another strain of Panama Disease.