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An Open Letter to QUT’s Dr James Dale, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Dear Dr Dale, QUT, Gates Foundation and CBD Delegates,

The Gates Foundation has invested 15 million dollars in Dr James Dale’s GMO so-called ‘super-bananas’ developed at QUT. The project is being touted as philanthropy with a humanitarian purpose in combating micronutrient deficiency. The GMO bananas, grown in Australia, are currently in Iowa in the US undergoing what Scientific American calls Market Trials – that is, trials that have been designed for marketing purposes, rather than thorough clinical trials.[i] While the Market Trials are gaining considerable media attention for the project, it is not at all clear that the GMO banana project is truly a charitable exercise. It is however a clear case of biopiracy.

Fe’i bananas (Musa troglodytarum L.) are a traditional food across the Asia-Pacific, found in an area ranging from Maluku in Indonesai to Tahiti and Hawaii in the Pacific. In 1788, Daniel Solander, accompanying botanist Joseph Banks and James Cook on the voyage of the

Endeavour, noted several varieties of Fe’i bananas used in Tahiti. Artist Paul Gauguin’s paintings Le Repas (The Meal), La Orana Maria (The Virgin Mary) and Tahitian Landscape, painted in 1891, depict these red-orange bananas. In Indonesia they are known as

pisang tongkat langit (sky cane bananas) because of the distinctive upright fruiting stem.

Until recently local consumption of Fe’i bananas across the region had been largely displaced by imported food cultures. In the early 2000′s US researcher Lois Englberger, living in Micronesia, after searching for sources of vitamin A in the traditional diet in Micronesia, found that Micronesian ‘Karat’ bananas – so called because of their orange flesh and high beta-carotene content – had been traditionally used as an infant weaning food. She presented her work on high beta-carotene local bananas at a symposium in Penang in 2004.[ii] Until then, few scientists were aware that there were orange fleshed bananas high in beta-carotene or that bananas could be used for addressing vitamin A deficiency.[iii]  At the time, the existence of high beta-carotene local bananas drew much global media attention.[iv]