What can big banana companies do in preparation?
Nothing! [laughs] What they could do is …. very little. What they say they’re going to do is quarantine their farms. Nobody thinks this is going to work. The reason it doesn’t work is that this is a soil-borne disease. So the second a hurricane blows up a lot of dirt — which happens a lot in the banana-growing countries of central America — it doesn’t work. What they need to do is they need to develop both banana diversity — which means learn to sell more than one type of banana — and they need to work on a genetically modified Cavendish that resists the disease, as well as work on other DNA-based solutions to stop the disease. None of these are guaranteed successes. But the companies really need to start now because they really haven’t been doing anything. The whole banana supply chain is custom tailored to the infinite degree to the Cavendish and only Cavendish. Companies would have to make major changes to bring in any other kind of banana, and they’re afraid to do it. From the cons
