Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, is more than a thousand miles northwest of the country’s largest banana plantations, which are centered around Innisfail, on the eastern seaboard. A ramshackle place, Darwin is known for its many impoverished indigenous residents, entertainment attractions like Crocosaurus Cove (where visitors are lowered, via “the Cage of Death,” into a crocodile-filled tank), and, as one local puts it, “not partying, exactly, but certainly drinking.” To Robert Borsato, a fruit farmer, the area looked like an ideal place to grow bananas. In 1996, he began farming a thousand acres in Humpty Doo, which is on the road between Darwin and Kakadu National Park.
To bear fruit, banana plants need at least fourteen consecutive months of frost-free weather, which is why they are not grown commercially in the continental United States. Darwin offered this, and more. As one of Borsato’s workers told me recently, “You came up here and saw the consistency that you’ve got between the blue sky, the sunshine, the water, the fucking soil. You knew you were going to beat everybody else, hands down.” There were a few nuisances: crocodiles wandered onto the property, Asian buffalo trampled young plants, and dingoes chewed the sprinklers. Before long, though, the Darwin Banana Farming Company was growing lush ten-foot plants with as many as a hundred and seventy bananas on each stalk. In 2006, Cyclone Larry decimated ninety per cent of the Innisfail plantations; banana prices soared from ten dollars a carton to a hundred and thirty, and Borsato became a multimillionaire.
More than a thousand kinds of banana can be found worldwide, but Borsato specialized in a variety called Cavendish, which a nineteenth-century British explorer happened upon in a household garden in southern China. Today, the Cavendish represents ninety-nine per cent of the banana export market. The vast majority of banana varieties are not viable for international trade: their bunches are too small, or their skin is too thin, or their pulp is too bland. Although Cavendishes need pampering, they are the only variety that provides farmers with a high yield of palatable fruit that can endure overseas trips without ripening too quickly or bruising too easily. The Cavendish, which is rich in Vitamins B6 and C, has high levels of potassium, magnesium, and fibre; it is also cheap—about sixty cents a pound. In 2008, Americans ate 7.6 billion pounds of Cavendish bananas, virtually all of them imported from Latin America. Each year, we eat as many Cavendish bananas as we do apples and oranges combined. Your supermarket likely sells many varieties of apples, but when you shop for bananas you usually have one option. The world’s banana plantations are a monoculture of Cavendishes.
Several years ago, Borsato noticed a couple of sick-looking plants on a neighbor’s property. The leaves turned a soiled yellow, starting at the edges and rapidly moving inward; necrotic patches appeared and, a few weeks later, the leaves buckled. What had once formed a canopy now dangled around the base of the plant, like a cast-off grass skirt. Inside the plant, the effects were even worse. Something was blocking the plants’ vascular system, causing rot, and tissue that should have been as ivory as the inside of a celery stalk was a putrefying mixture of brown, black, and blood-red. When the plants were cut open, they smelled like garbage, and their roots were so anemic that the plants could barely stay upright.
Borsato feared that he was seeing the symptoms of a pestilence that had wiped out the Cavendish across Asia: Tropical Race Four. A soil-borne fungus that is known to be harmful only to bananas, it can survive for decades in the dirt, spreading through the transportation of tainted plants, or in infected mud stuck to a tractor’s tire or a rancher’s boot. It cannot be controlled with chemicals. Tropical Race Four appeared in Taiwan in the late eighties, and destroyed roughly seventy per cent of the island’s Cavendish plantations. In Indonesia, more than twelve thousand acres of export bananas were abandoned; in Malaysia, a local newspaper branded the disease “the H.I.V. of banana plantations.” When the fungus reached China and the Philippines, the effect was equally ruinous.
Australia was next. Over the following three years, Borsato watched as the other banana farmers in Darwin succumbed to the disease. “A lot of people were in denial,” he recalled. “Most growers tried to hide the fact that they had it. It would’ve devalued their property immensely. But today nearly everybody is out. The guy across the street now grows melons.” He went on, “The government tried to put in a quarantine. You couldn’t move equipment around. There were footbaths to wash your shoes in. Stuff like that. We put a new car park in, paved it all up for the sake of the quarantine, went to that level of expense, and you know what happened? The first idiot to drive up went screaming past all our new signs. Drove right up on the muddy road, up to the shed! It was a bloody idiot government official.”
Scientists believe that Tropical Race Four, which has caused tens of millions of dollars’ worth of damage, will ultimately find its way to Latin America—and to the fruit that Americans buy. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida, who was the first researcher to identify Tropical Race Four, said. “People are bringing stuff in their luggage, moving stuff around the world that they shouldn’t be. I hope it doesn’t happen, but history has shown that this kind of stuff does happen.” Borsato was more blunt: “Shit’s gonna move. Americans are snookered. They’d better wake up and realize it, or they’re not going to have any bananas to eat.”
“We were prepared to give up,” Borsato told me one afternoon, as he and his farm manager, Mark Smith, showed me around their plantation. “But you just can’t get excited about melons.”
Borsato, who is fifty, has a fringe of white hair and the shoulders of a rugby fullback. (He used to play in high school.) He told me that he had taken much of the money he had earned from the Cyclone Larry shortage and invested it back into his farm. For a while, he and Smith tried to grow bananas only in soil that Tropical Race Four had apparently not yet reached. They soon ran out of virgin land. Then they planted cassava and pinto peanuts, hoping to rejuvenate the soil, and applied quicklime to lower the soil’s acidity; these efforts failed to counteract the blight. A few years ago, Borsato leased ninety acres of a seemingly unsullied property twenty miles away. To insure that infected machinery wasn’t used, Smith and a small crew planted forty-three thousand banana stalks by hand. Within eight months, Tropical Race Four had appeared. Today, Borsato farms only a quarter of his land, and every week he and Smith chop down two hundred infected plants. “In another month, that’ll be three hundred,” Smith said.
As we walked through the fields, Tropical Race Four seemed as abundant as the mosquitoes circling our heads. “There’s one,” Smith said, pointing. “That’s two. You can see that one there? He’s coming out. There’s another one.” Some plants were just turning yellow; others were a desiccated mass of raw umber. At one point, Smith unsheathed a cane knife, which is similar to a machete, but with a shorter, wider blade. An axe is not needed to cut down a banana plant, which is not a tree but, rather, the world’s largest herb. The part that is usually called the trunk is the pseudostem—a barkless staff composed only of leaves waiting to unfurl. In one stroke, Smith sliced through a diseased plant. The inside resembled a crushed-out cigar, and the fetid odor was overwhelming. Smith said, “You smell that, and you think, Ah, fuck.”
Borsato shook his head. “Cruel,” he said. “Just cruel.” Lately, he had been obtaining fresh plants from a laboratory that cultivated the seeds in antiseptic petri dishes. But, because the fungus is in his soil, he could get only one or two bunches before the plants died.
Smith was wearing a blue baseball cap that depicted a banana above the slogan “Get Bent Into Shape.” He removed it and wiped his brow. “You see one plant, and you know pretty soon you’ll be up shit creek,” he said. “All this work we’re doing—it’s not viable. The only way to keep going is to breed a disease-resistant variety, one with commercial potential. That’s the only way.”
Borsato knew that attempts to replace the Cavendish through traditional breeding—crossing two bananas to create a third, disease-resistant fruit—had failed. After a series of phone calls, Internet searches, and chance encounters, he found James Dale, a professor at Queensland University of Technology, in Brisbane, who experiments with genetically modified crops. In 1994, Dale produced one of the first genetically transformed Cavendishes. He and his team members inserted what is known as a marker gene; the resulting banana, when placed under ultraviolet light, glowed fluorescent green. More recently, in research supported by the Gates Foundation, Dale has been trying to increase the provitamin-A content of locally grown bananas in Uganda, where villagers eat several bananas daily.
This spring, Dale expects to plant on Borsato’s land four acres of banana plants that have been genetically modified to resist the blight. The Australian Research Council will pay for much of the field trial, but Borsato is also investing a quarter of a million dollars. “And we’ll go to the millions,” he told me. “Someone has to do this work. Otherwise, there’ll be grief.”****
The Queensland University of Technology borders Brisbane’s City Botanic Gardens, where students read under weeping figs and cabbage-tree palms. Dale’s office, at the university’s Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities, is less picturesque. “Our lab was once voted the ugliest building in Brisbane,” Dale told me. “It was painted pink and gray—appalling, just dreadful. The university’s solution was to give each floor a different color scheme. Now we’ve got a lime-green-and-red interior.”
Dale leads a team of a dozen scientists, and on the day I visited he informed them of the Australian Research Council’s decision to fund the Darwin field trial. “It’s all go!” he said. The news aroused only muffled enthusiasm. “They know that the plants have to perform,” Dale explained later. “Otherwise, we don’t keep getting money.” Dale, an affable, diminutive man with a wispy white beard, noted another challenge that banana scientists faced: bad jokes. He said, “I hate when people ask, ‘Hey, James. How are you going to straighten the banana?’ Yeah, we get it: bananas are phallic. I always say, ‘Well, you dickhead . . . ’ ”
Despite the fruit’s priapic associations—the refrain from an old blues song contains the line “Let me put my banana in your fruit basket”—the bananas we eat are sterile. Unlike wild bananas, the Cavendish doesn’t have seeds, because it has three sets of chromosomes; it’s what biologists call a triploid—in this case, the haphazard product of two wild, seeded diploids that mated thousands of years ago. (Wild bananas, which have flinty seeds the size of peppercorns, can be found across Asia.) Cavendish and other domesticated banana plants produce fruit without fertilization. In a healthy nine-month-old Cavendish plant, a secondary stalk rises from the center of the pseudostem and, a few months later, droops with a single eighty-pound bunch. A bunch consists of a dozen “hands,” and each hand has some twenty “fingers,” or individual bananas. (Fingers do not hang down but, instead, curl toward the sky.) Meanwhile, small suckers poke out from the plant’s roots. When growers harvest the bunch, they cut down the “mother” plant and all but the heartiest sucker. In another year, that sucker sprouts a new bunch. In this way, commercial banana plants can produce genetically identical fruit for decades. Tropical Race Four has upended this efficient method of cultivation; one of the main ways that farmers spread the disease is by uprooting contaminated suckers that appear to be clean and replanting them elsewhere.
On a wall in Dale’s office, there was a painting of a gyrating Josephine Baker, naked except for a pendulous skirt of bananas. “It’s a real leap of faith,” he said of the Cavendish project. “We trust the gene’s in there, but until the plant grows up we don’t know if it will be blight-resistant. That’s the mystery and the magic.”