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The banana you know and love is in trouble.
A variety called the Cavendish, which makes up the majority of banana imports around the world (and is America's most popular food), is being publicly mourned from the UK to our own Tech Insider newsroom.
The problem is a strain of fungus that infects the roots of a banana tree and keeps the plant from taking in nutrients and water.
History seems to be repeating itself. The bananas your grandparents ate were a variety called Gros Michel, which apparently make bananas at your grocery store seem unbearably bland by comparison.
So what was so great about the Gros Michel, and how did we get here?
You've seen this banana before: It's the Cavendish. The US imported nearly 4.8 billion tons of them in 2012, and worldwide banana exports these days are worth about $8.9 billion.
Organic bananas are pictured in an organic supermarket in Berlin, January 31, 2013.
REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
This is Gros Michel, also called Big Mike. Bananas were still an exotic delicacy until the late 1800s — when the United Fruit Company (UFC) single-handedly popularized this variety of bananas on a global scale.
A 1863 Dutch lithograph of a Gros Michel banana bunch.
G. Sévereyns/Wikimedia Commons
Gros Michels were sweet, creamy, and sturdy. You could throw them in a ship's cargo hold and they'd show up at their destination, perfectly ripe and unbruised.
Banana loaders unload a car of bananas of the first shipment at the United Fruit Company docks for transfer to a waiting ship in Puerto Cortes, Honduras on Sept. 3, 1954. About 34,000 bunches made up the first shipment in over two months. In the foreground are bunches of bananas rejected for shipment because of over-ripeness. These will be given to workers for their consumption.
AP
UFC, before it become Chiquita, cleared hundreds of acres of rainforest for banana plantations — and led to countless deaths and alleged human rights abuses.
A 19th-century banana plantation in Jamaica, the origin of the first imported bananas.
Wikimedia Commons
But the fruit's dark history isn't what sunk Big Mike. Since the beginning, UFC's banana crop was endangered by Panama disease, which resulted in $18.2 billion in damage in today's dollars.
A Costa Rican Gros Michel banana tree wilts from Panama disease.
E.W. Brandes/Public domain
So in 1947, UFC's rival — Standard Fruit — introduced the Cavendish. Though the fruit was more delicate and less tasty, it was resistant to Panama disease.
Costa Rica: banana plantation, loading bananas on goods wagons, published in 1921
Ullstein Bild
Cavendish bananas, originally bred in a hothouse in England, replaced the Gros Michel as the world's most popular banana by the 1950s. But the Cavendish are sterile, meaning the only way to keep growing them is through cloning.
The decidedly un-tropical ancestral home of the Duke of Devonshire, whose gardener bred the Cavendish.
Paul Collins/Wikimedia Commons
Now the fungus is back and more deadly than ever. The new strain, called Tropical Race 4 (Panama disease is now called Tropical Race 1), first appeared in Taiwan. Even a tiny amount of infected soil can transfer the deadly fungus.
Panama disease symptom on banana. Note the internal necrosis within the pseudostem. The disease is caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum.
Scott Nelson/Flickr
There is hope for the banana, though. Scientists are looking to genetic modification to create a banana that can resist the fungus — but anti-GMO sentiment would be a huge obstacle.
A laboratory assistant displays a young banana plant at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) laboratories in Seibersdorf, some 50 kilometres (some 31 miles) southeast of Vienna, October 14, 2009. Better varieties of under-utilized food and industrial crops are developed by use of modern biotechnologies at the Plant Breeding Unit of the IAEA.
Herwig Prammer/Reuters
Others are looking into reinvigorating endangered banana species and encouraging biodiversity in the industry.
An Israeli farmer holds three different types of Bananas at his Kibbutz's farm near the coastal town of Hadera.
Nir Elias/Reuters
Either way, it's not looking good for the armies of cloned Cavendish banana plants. Something else is bound to replace the variety we take for granted in a matter of years.
A male common squirrel monkey (Saimiri sciureus) eats a banana inside an open air enclosure at Royev Ruchey zoo in the suburbs of Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, June 22, 2012.
REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin
