As
a life-long and still die-hard banana eater — locavoreanism be damned, they don’t grow
well in the North Carolina mountains — I’ve been meaning to read the
recent bunch of well-regarded books on the travails of Americans’ favorite breakfast
fruit. (Emily Biuso’s 2008
Nation review piqued
my appetite on this front.) The trouble with bananas is this: the
export market is dominated by a single variety that’s being stalked by a
ruinous blight.

Well, lucky me: bananas have gotten the
New Yorker treatment. Rather than plow through books, you can now read Mike Peed’s recent, quite good and not-very-long piece ($ub req’d) on the looming banana crisis. The article has generated plenty
of buzz in sustainable-food circles. Before I had a chance to read it, I
saw a couple of list-serv postings arguing that it presents a compelling
case for subjecting bananas to genetic modification.

The
argument seems to go like this. Bananas are a massive source of
nutrients and income in the global south. The one variety that has been
deemed fit for the export market — the Cavendish, selected for bland
flavor, portability, and monster yields — risks being wiped out by a
fungus bearing the oddly frightful name of Tropical Race Four. If only
geneticists could find a gene that resists Tropical Race Four and
splice it into banana plants, the catastrophe could be averted.
Moreover, unlike with, say, corn or alfalfa, there’s no chance of a GMO
Cavendish spreading genetic material to wild or non-GMO bananas, because
the Cavendish is sterile.

But I came away from Peed’s article with the opposite
conclusion: I see no compelling case for GMO-izing bananas. First of
all, such a project would probably have little effect on how people eat
where bananas are actually grown. Peed reports that despite the yellow
fruit’s ubiquity in U.S. and European supermarkets, 87 percent of
bananas produced in the world are consumed right where they’re grown: in
the hot parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And guess what?
Tropical Race Four doesn’t threaten this bounty.