Climate change could take a bite out of the banana industry | The ideal places to grow them could get too hot for the fruit.

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Climate change could take a bite out of the banana industry » Yale Climate Connections

8 comments

Banana industry and fossil fuel industry need to declare war on each other.
bananas have other problems like a fungus/infection wiping out a single genetic orgin cultivar.
First time?
- The Gros Michel is where artificial banana flavoring comes from. You can actually still get them, but they are around $90 per pound of bananas. There's a greenhouse in Florida that can still grow them. I ordered a bunch of them a few years ago, and can confirm they taste like artificial banana, though not as sweet as most things that are banana flavored.
I literally do not care about the banana industry
- People care when foods they've been eating are no longer available in quantity or at a reasonable price.
  
  Unfortunately, nature doesn't.
  They have no ability to reproduce anymore. Not the kind we regularly eat anyway. We bred them to have non-viable seeds, thus no offspring, thus no ability to evolve or adapt to changing environments or stressors.
  Every banana tree is a clone of the original batch.
  This just means that with climate change, it will become impossible to grow those trees, and that variety will go extinct.
  Honestly, we should let it. The agriculture practices required to keep them are just plain unsustainable, both ecologically and economically.
  This isn't even going into the controversy around the political side of the industry as well with subpar worker conditions and abuse of rights.
  So the alternative argument of "I'll be mildly inconvenienced from not having near constant access to bananas" kinda loses its legitimacy in comparison.

8 comments