The Fate of Bananas

With this red, Abe Lincoln beard, round face and large hands, plant pathologist Emile Frison is talking bananas to me in Southern France. Not just any bananas‹genetically modified bananas, a type of genetically modified organism, or GMO.

A GMO is any creature or plant bioengineered by scientists‹say by inserting a new gene from another organism or by creating and inserting an artificial gene that doesn¹t appear in nature.

For bananas and other crops, these bio-adjustments are designed to increase yields, improve a plant¹s defenses against pests or allow crops to thrive under poor conditions.

Environmentalists and other lovers of the organic oppose genetically modified foods as unnatural, often less tasty than the original, and possibly dangerous. Most Americans, however, don¹t seem too upset about eating bioengineered corn flakes and tortillas. Last year in the United States, genetically modified soybeans accounted for more than 50 percent of total yields; GMO corn accounted for almost 40 percent.

In Europe, opposition is more potent. Polls show that only one in four Europeans favours genetically modified foods. On the other hand, this same poll says that Europeans by a slim majority support research into genetically modifying humans. This situation is almost the exact reverse of how Americans feel.

Anti-GMO furor in Europe is frustrating to the Belgium-born Frison, who was introduced to me along with his banana work by San Francisco filmmaker Xandra Castleton.

Frison definitely does not work for Monsanto or other food giants. After earning his doctorate in Belgium, he worked for years in West Africa on development projects to help small-scale farmers improve their staple crops.

In 1995, he became the director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain, a nonprofit consortium of small-scale banana growers in 100 countries.

Genetic fix

Late last year, he was promoted to director general of the association¹s parent organisation, the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, an independent group funded mostly by government and foundation grants.

Leading me into a steamy greenhouse outside Montpelier filled with leafy banana trees, Frison explains that bananas and plantains are in trouble. Imperiled by pests they cannot fend off, they need a genetic fix. Otherwise, many varieties may one day become extinct.

The problem is that bananas have not had sex for 10,000 years. Edible bananas are mutants with three sets of chromosomes instead of the two found in wild bananas, causing the edibles to be seedless and therefore sterile.

Without seeds, the edibles cannot reproduce something discovered by Stone Age foragers, probably in Papua New Guinea, some 5500 years before the pharaoh Cheops built the largest of the Giza pyramids. Since then, the banana has spread around the world, every plant grown by replanting shoots that sprout from the base of matured stalks. Most banana plants come from the original trees of 10,000 years ago.

With its DNA frozen in time, the hapless banana has not been able to modify itself genetically through natural selection to fend off pests and bugs that have appeared in the past 100 centuries. The most serious threat comes from Black Sigatoka, a fungus that has spread around the world since devastating plantains in Fiji during the Œ60s.

Other blights are Panama disease, a soil fungus impervious to fungicides, and weevil borers, a pincer-tipped bug with larvae that gouge burrows into stalks.

We love bananas, but we won¹t go hungry if they disappear. They taste good in daiguiris and smashed into a baby¹s mush. The most profitable export fruit in the world, bananas earn US$12 billion for Chiquita, Dole and other companies growing crops in South America and Africa.

For the poor in developing nations, however‹more than 400 million people from Honduras and Cuba to Uganda, Ethiopia and the Philippines‹bananas and plantains are major food staples. They consume 9 of 10 bananas and plantains, 90 million metric tons annually.
Rich in vitamins, potassium, magnesium and fiber, bananas and plantains in the tropics grow yellow, orange, green or brown, some as big as a football or as small as a child¹s finger, some sweet, some starchy. In some areas, crop yields for small-scale farmers are down by as much as 50 to 75 percent in the last 30 years. In Uganda, entire regions north of Kampala once thick with bananas have been decimated by Black Sigatoka‹this in a country that eats bananas three meals a day and where the word for banana, matooke, also means food.

Already, entire varieties of bananas have vanished. The Gros Michel used to be the big banana in the West. This was the banana that Carmen Miranda wore in the fruit bowl balanced on her head and that Josephine Baker wore with nothing else during her banana-skirt routine in Paris in the Œ20s.

In the 1950s, Panama disease struck and obliterated the Gros Michel, which was replaced by the Panama-disease-resistant Cavendish, the slightly less sweet banana that now appears on our grocery shelves.

Exporters are able to fend off pests by heavy use of chemicals‹as many as 40 sprayings a year, more than any other crop, which poor farmers cannot afford. Field-hands working in Latin America suffer from high rates of leukemia and sterility from these pesticides.
Frison¹s fix is to insert a gene from rice that works as a natural fungicide to fend off Black Sigatoka. He is working with a young Ugandan Ph.D. student, Geoffrey Arinaitwe, who is training at the Laboratory for Tropical Crop Improvement in Leuven, Belgium, which is affiliated with the growers¹ consortium.

Arinaitwe comes from one of the prime banana-growing regions in his country, the rolling, volcanic highlands west of Lake Victoria, where his family owns and farms a small plot of bananas threatened by Black Sigatoka.

After visiting Frison in Montpelier, I travelled to Leuven, where Arinaitwe showed me the results of his rice-to-banana gene swap: a perfectly normal looking banana tree growing in a greenhouse, protected from the Belgium soil by barriers and subjected to rigorous tests for toxicity and for effectiveness in warding off Black Sigatoka.

Arinaitwe, a thin, shy man, insists that the bananas are safe. ³I know what I put in them, and they are not dangerous².

The International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain is also trying non-genetic fixes. Another plant scientist, Rohy Swennon, the head of the Leuven lab and a banana network research fellow, has spent years coaxing seeds from the sterile bananas by looking for mutants of the mutants - that is, by growing thousands of plants in search of the few that appear now and then with a seed or two.

Swenson cross-breeds the resulting plants with inedible wild bananas that are fertile and can naturally resist fungi. Some of these hybrids are growing in farms in several countries and have fended off fungi. However, the lack of seeds makes this a less than perfect repair because they can¹t easily reproduce and the resulting fruit tastes bitter.

Frison has little patience with those opposed to all GMO foods, saying that the fears are not supported by science. ³They don¹t want to hear anything that does not agree with their position,² he says. ³It¹s annoying.²

Frison is equally critical of companies¹ aggressive claims about GMO food. The truth, he says, lies somewhere in the middle, with a spectrum between GMO foods that are safe and those that are not. Dangers include GMO plants that unintentionally turn toxic and hurt or kill other plants, animals or humans, or that cause horrible allergies. Another fear is that rogue genes will be accidentally transferred into a complicated ecosystem to incite unintended havoc.

On the safe end of the spectrum, ample evidence exists that some genetic modifications are OK, says Frison. The rice gene, for instance, appears to be safe in the banana so far, although Aritnaitwe¹s tests are not yet finished.

Frison¹s group favours regulation and stringent testing for safety. The Lueven lab follows strict EU protocols that are more rigorous in Europe than in the United States.

Frison believes that the animosity toward GMO foods comes less from science and safety than from a decade of insensitivity by highly profitable global food giants that force genetically modified foods onto reluctant populations.

International food fight

Most people in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are grappling with a basic trepidation over the still freakish notion of inserting the gene of one species into another, never mind into foods that we will eat. In Europe, mad cow disease, and other food scares also remain fresh memories.

A smarter idea for food conglomerates would be to answer fears by openly supporting regulations and policies that explain the technology, reassure people about GMO safety, and clearly label genetically modified products.

Instead, Big Foot, supported by the Bush administration, continues to push the aggressive exportation of corn, soybeans and other modified crops, literally trying to force these foods down peoples¹ throats. Likewise, European food giants and some politicians respond by using the fear factor to keep out competing American exports.

Lost in this international food fight is the poor banana. With no seeds to sell and plenty of Cavendishes being grown for now in fields drenched in pesticides, the banana barons have little incentive to create a transgenic fix. So far, Chiquita, Dole and other companies have no plans to introduce GM bananas for export.

This situation allows us to unpeel the politics of GMO foods for bananas and to consider the science and safety issues as well as the pressing needs of 400 million banana dependents. These people most likely will not die of starvation without a GMO banana.
But millions already face hardship and economic dislocation as they are forced to grow less-productive foods that degrade the soil and yield less biomass.

Frison remains frustrated by hardliners on both sides of the debate imposing their political and commercial imperatives on the scientific debate. There is a middle ground‹to agree on a reasonable and very visible testing and regulation. When the results are in, let¹s ban what¹s dangerous, and regulate and approve what¹s safe. The fate of more than the banana may depend on it.

€ David Ewing Duncan, a Sans Francisco writer, is executive director of BioAgenda, an independent think-tank that host forums and events on biotech and cutting edge life sciences.