Tales from the Supply Chain:
Why bananas may go extinct (again)
A recent article by Dan Wang, a writer for freight forwarder Flexport, tells you everything that happens to a banana between the time it’s picked to the time it gets to a supermarket. He claims that, "as you read more, it will be hard to avoid the death of another banana."
Your grandparents probably grew up eating the Gros Michel, a creamier, fruitier banana that was wiped out by a similar fungal disease no more than a few decades ago. Times have changed since the bananas collapse. The Gros Michel was largely an export crop, not a staple of the South American diet. But now many more people depend on growing the Cavendish. It’s one of the top export commodities for countries like Panama, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Ecuador, Colombia, and Honduras. The disappearance of the Cavendish will affect their nutrition and livelihood. And this time, there may be no new strain of banana on the horizon to replace the Cavendish.
Even if we manage to develop one, the complexities of logistics prevents us from moving on. We’ve had decades to tweak the supply chain so that it’s perfectly optimized for the Cavendish. There’s little appetite to completely rebuild the infrastructure for supporting the production of a new banana. Can it be chilled? Will you need ripening rooms? What will be the right temperature and relative humidity to store them?
The Cavendish won’t disappear tomorrow. It will take several decades for Tropical Race 4 to ruin existing crops. Will we one day have to tell our grandchildren what bananas used to taste like?
Click here to read the full article by Dan Wang at www.flexport.com.
