The race to save bananas from extinction
A deadly fungus threatens the planet’s fourth most important crop with extinction, but a U.K. startup thinks it may have the solution
When it comes to tropical fruits, Norwich, U. K., probably isn’t the first place that springs to mind. But here, in a drab research park at the edge of the East Anglian city, a team of banana experts led by a former Israeli naval commander is working feverishly to save the fruit from extinction.
“Bananas are the fourth most-important food crop globally, it’s the most consumed and produced food,” says Gilad Gershon, CEO of Tropic Biosciences.
The startup, which moved to Norwich in 2016, consists of a team of almost 50 scientists and researchers working on editing the genes of bananas to protect them against diseases.
It’s for a good reason. For more than 20 years, tropical race 4 ( TR4), a soil-borne strain of the Fusarium wilt fungus, has been slowly making its way across the world from Southeast Asia, threatening to wreak havoc on the global banana industry.
In 2013, the fungus was discovered on a farm in northern Mozambique, before making its way to Colombia, where it was detected last year, leading to a national state of emergency. Bananas are a major crop and a mainstay of the country’s agricultural economy.
As the world’s fourth-largest exporter of bananas, the arrival of the disease in South America has created a problem for the industry. The disease disrupts the vascular systems of plants and can live in the soil for decades.
There is an additional problem.
Bananas are uniquely vulnerable to disease because a single strain of the fruit, known as the Cavendish banana, overwhelmingly dominates the global industry, making it highly susceptible.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Cavendish banana accounts for 50 per cent of global production, while constituting almost 100 per cent of the global export market, worth more than US$13.6 billion.
“The disease is a significant threat for the banana sector, particularly for the Cavendish bananas, not only from the supply point of view but also for the economies of the banana-producing countries and livelihoods of smallholder producers,” says Fazil Dusunceli, agriculture officer at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
Tropic Biosciences, which raised US$10 million in a Series A round in 2018, has since been doubling down on efforts to find ways of protecting the Cavendish banana from wipeout.
Cavendish bananas are asexual, which means they can’t be bred in a way that eliminates the genes putting them at risk, according to Gershon. So the company has put its gene- editing technology to work to mitigate challenges from the fungus.
“The impact is potentially catastrophic for the banana industry ... the exposure here is massive because you have a single banana,” he says. “The weight on our shoulders as a company today is very high. There’s not a lot of people solving this massive banana issue in the world.”
There is a lot at stake. The population of the Tropics will grow by over 500 million people by 2030, accounting for half the world’s population. This creates an unprecedented need for more productive and environmentally friendly agricultural production. Nor are concerns over a banana plight unwarranted. In the first half of the 20th century, the Gros Michel banana, which went by the nickname “Big Mike,” was the most popular variant of the fruit, with exports from Central America to the U.S. and Europe dominating the trade.
The singular focus on Gros Michel, a small banana described as having a tartish aftertaste, proved to be lucrative but ran a risk. In the 1950s, the United Fruit Company, a U.S. firm that established sprawling plantations in places such as Costa Rica and Guatemala, led to the development of so- called “banana republics” that forced economies into a dependence on a genetically limited crop.
The disease is a significant threat for the banana sector.
A collapse was inevitable. Amid growing rebellion from locals who demanded higher wages, the United Fruit Company’s annual profits of US $ 65 million came under pressure when tropical race 1, a strain, of the fungal Panama disease, infected the fruit and brought commercial production to a screeching halt.
It’s the kind of threat banana producers are desperate to prevent, but there is the risk of history repeating itself, with an industry dependent on the export of a single type of banana again.
For Gershon, it means that there is work to be done. After six years in the Israel Defense Forces, where he commanded a ship as a lieutenant- commander, the Tropic Biosciences boss made a foray into venture capital, becoming a senior investor at Pontifax Agtech, a Los Angeles-based fund specializing in food and agriculture technology.
“In that capacity I became more and more aware of the promise of gene editing from a financial perspective. It’s a technology that significantly speeds up and simplifies the process of developing genetically engineered plant products,” he says.
For Gershon’s Norwich-based startup, which is also working on cutting the caffeine content of coffee, gene editing technologies have become a critical tool to protect the banana.
Originally based in Israel and the U. S., Tropic Biosciences picked Norwich as a location four years ago because of the supply of skilled local scientists from the university and the John Innes Centre, an independent international centre of excellence in plant science, genetics and microbiology.
Specifically, one of the main tools in the firm’s arsenal of tools is CRISPR, a technology that significantly reduces the cost of editing genes — the essential coding for biology. It works by using a protein to cut away at sequences of DNA that might code for unfavourable traits. At first, when the startup began to look at bananas, it picked traits it described as “low- hanging fruit” — extending the shelflife of bananas and reducing the speed at which they turn brown. Then it recognized their potential to tackle the impending threat to the banana’s survival. Its technology works by taking a banana flower from a place like Colombia and reducing it to millions of stem cells in cultures. Then, sequences of the Cavendish banana genes that make it susceptible to TR4 fungus are cut out.
According to Dusunceli, emerging technologies like this offer the chance to “develop resistant varieties”, but pose some issues.
“The issue is agronomic performance of the products and acceptance by the producers and consumers,” he says.
Gershon recognizes the challenges some people face in embracing food that has been edited, but is keen to highlight that the bananas it grows do not involve the injection of foreign DNA .
“People have very strong feelings towards bananas and the idea of this crop being potentially lost due to this disease highlights the need to address it,” he says.