You say you have a thing for Bananas?

[Five_Inch_Heels]

You might be in for a disappointment whatever you use them for.

Business news today says there is a fungus among us wiping out banana crops and they may soon become all but extinct.

 

[Hard_Rom]

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140316140211/degrassi/images/1/13/Minion_whaaat.gif

As long as chocolate doesn't go extinct.

 

[pollynova]

NOOO!! I have a banana every day! I love them!

 

[Hard_Rom]

Some serious shit!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...gus-decimates-global-banana-crop-9239464.html

Bananageddon: Millions face hunger as deadly fungus Panama disease decimates global banana crop
Disease spreads from Asia to Africa and may already have jumped to crucial plantations in Latin America

Scientists have warned that the world’s banana crop, worth £26 billion and a crucial part of the diet of more than 400 million people, is facing “disaster” from virulent diseases immune to pesticides or other forms of control.

Alarm at the most potent threat – a fungus known as Panama disease tropical race 4 (TR4) – has risen dramatically after it was announced in recent weeks that it has jumped from South-east Asia, where it has already devastated export crops, to Mozambique and Jordan.

A United Nations agency told The Independent that the spread of TR4 represents an “expanded threat to global banana production”. Experts said there is a risk that the fungus, for which there is currently no effective treatment, has also already made the leap to the world’s most important banana growing areas in Latin America, where the disease threatens to destroy vast plantations of the Cavendish variety. The variety accounts for 95 per cent of the bananas shipped to export markets including the United Kingdom, in a trade worth £5.4bn.

Since it emerged in the 1950s as the replacement for another banana variety ravaged by an earlier form of Panama disease, Cavendish has helped make bananas the most valuable fruit crop in the world, dominated by large multinational growing companies such as Fyffes, Chiquita and Dole.

The Panama fungus is just one of several diseases which also threaten banana production, in particular among smallholders and subsistence farmers.

Black sigatoka, another fungus to have spread from Asia, has decimated production in parts of the Caribbean since it arrived in the 1990s, reducing exports by 90 to 100 per cent in five countries.

Researchers say they are struggling to secure funding to discover new banana varieties or develop disease-resistant GM strains.

When the world banana industry found itself in crisis in the 1950s, it was saved by a fruit cultivated in Derbyshire and named after a duke.

The Cavendish banana was grown by the gardener and architect Joseph Paxton while he was working for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House.

Paxton managed to acquire one of two banana plants sent to England in around 1830 and began growing the fruit in the stately home’s glasshouses. He named his banana Musa cavendishii after the 6th Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish.

The Chatsworth bananas were later sent to Samoa and the Canary Islands, providing forerunners for the variety which emerged in the 1950s to succeed the Gros Michel or Big Mike – the banana sub-species wiped out by an early version of Panama disease between 1903 and 1960.

Cavendish is now the world’s single most successful – and valuable – banana, accounting for 47 per cent of all cultivated bananas and nearly the entire export trade, worth £5.3 billion.

 

[Saint Peter]

https://www.elementsbathandbody.com/images/P/Banana1.jpg

 

[warrior queen]

The CSIRO here in Oz have been researching ways to make Australia's bananas disease resistant, and have apparently had some success. So it may not be all doom and gloom.
Of course, when the rest of the world's crops go belly up, you will be forced to sell a kidney to afford a couple of bananas...... when cyclones all but demolished the crops a few years ago, the price of bananas went up to $23/kg for a year here! The usual price is $3/kg.

 

[Oh_That_Guy]

Bananas have changes a few times over the centuries. The ones we have now were made because the last ones were going extinct due to disease. We'll fix it and make some new ones and in a hundred years or so have to do it all over again.
GMO's. You know, those things everyone complains about?