Scientists and Farmers Race to Save the World’s Banana Supply

Roughly 99% of the world’s bananas are threatened by a fungus. To save them, scientists are turning to genetic modification.

For 40 years, farmers, scientists and major producers in the industry have watched with growing anxiety as the fungus García-Bastidas saw, Fusarium odoratissimum, or Tropical Race 4, marched through banana plantations in Southeast Asia. In 2013, García-Bastidas reported finding it for the first time outside that region, in Jordan. Soon it spilled into the banana fields of Africa.

Fusarium is naturally occurring and typically spreads when contaminated soil hitches a ride on clothing, shoes or vehicles. In a banana field it burrows into the soil and attacks through the roots, quickly invading a plant’s vascular system and choking off the flow of water and nutrients, rotting it from the inside long before bananas appear. Slice open the corm—the bulblike appendage under the soil from which the pseudostem grows—and the infected plant material resembles the brittle embers left after a campfire. And there are no treatments for this. No preventatives, no cures. Even after chewing through every plant, TR4 remains in the soil, ruining the fields for future production.

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