science, health & technology

When a monoculture
is hit by a blight
by Eric Jackson

The situation in the banana fields of Baru district has been grim for years, with Chiquita Brands first demanding concessions from the banana workers' union, then announcing that it would be ending production, then devolving its plantations to a workers' cooperative named COOSEMUPAR, which was hobbled first by a self-interested (now former) union leadership that treated the co-op as its own personal property and most of all by a contract that required all of the devolved plantations to sell exclusively to Chiquita at prices set by the company, which were way below what the world market would bear. COOSEMUPAR only survived on government subsidies, an unsustainable situation. Finally the government changed positions and insisted that Chiquita renounce its exclusive contract, which it did this past December, and now a new contract with an Italian company gives the co-op's hungry members hope for the future.

However, while COOSEMUPAR members were doing battle with underemployment, exhausted credit at local grocery stores, hunger and complicated legal and political battles, out in the fields they were confronted with another challenge, sigatoka negra (black leaf streak, or Ascomycete Mycosphaerella infection), a fungal banana blight --- often mistakenly described as a virus --- that has made its appearance in many of the Baru banana fields. It's telltale sign is little black spots of dead tissue on the undersides of the leaves.

Here in Panama, lots of folks are acquainted with different sorts of bananas, most likely the sweet little finger bananas --- primitivos --- which can be bought in local stores but don't keep well enough for export markets. Some of us know and appreciate the red Asian bananas, and the plaintain that's a major food staple is, after all, a species of banana. But understand that to most North Americans and many people in much of the rest of the world, the concept "banana" means not only a single species --- Musa Acuminata --- but more narrowly its Cavendish strain, all of which are cloned from a single plant.

Why the Cavendish? Because in the 1950s the multinational banana industry was running monoculture plantations of the Gros Michel strain, and a soil-based fungal blight that was first identified here and was thus dubbed "Panama Disease" devastated the banana industry. United Fruit, the precursor of Chiquita, brought in the resistant Cavendish bananas as its solution and its smaller competitors followed suit.

So what to do about sigatoka, which is a growing if not exactly new threat to commercial banana production elsewhere?

It's contagious, but not so much so that its appearance on a plantation spreads to all stalks in short order. The standard procedure has been to promptly eliminate the affected plants and keep the remaining bananas well watered and reasonably insect-free, which will help them resist infection. However, this process tends to slow, not eliminate, the contagion.

At universities around the world and agricultural research stations across the tropics, the corporate world is financing the search for different strains of bananas that have the qualities that fit with their customers' expectations and their shipping and distribution systems. Naturally occurring banana strains are being tried, as are such gene splicing strategies as an Indian lab's addition of material extracted from the skin secretions of the African Clawed Frog. The choice between natural or genetically modified replacement of the Cavendish banana may, despite the best legal strategies and political lobbying efforts of multinational corporations, depend on consumer acceptance in markets like those of Western Europe in which people are suspicious of foods derived from plants with gene spliced DNA.

The basic assumption in favor of an industrialized monoculture underlies most of these academic searches, but even within the companies that lead the industry there are voices raised for the proposition that vast plantations of clones of a single plant may not be a very good idea.

And then there is the old slash-and-burn thinking and its more modern variants: grow an unsustainable monoculture while the growing is good, and when the diseases become too much abandon the plantation and set up production in some as yet unblighted elsewhere.

However, sigatoka is not a new blight. In fact it's so old that it's mentioned in some of the most ancient of world literature, the Hindu Vedas. Not only do the Vedas mention the disease, they also prescribe a treatment, modernly known as Homa Therapy.

Homa Therapy is pre-scientific, originally stated in religious terms about the healing Agnihotra fire. A mixture of cow manure, raw whole grain brown rice and ghee (clarified butter) is burned at sunrise and sunset in copper pyramid-shaped containers placed at certain intervals in the field to be treated, with certain mantras chanted over them in the process. The resulting ash is then mixed with water and the bananas are watered with it. In India, Peru, the United States and other places there are and have been scientific experiments of various sorts to verify whether Homa Therapy works and if so, why and how well.

Some of this experimentation is, like "creation science," not really scientific in that it begins with a conclusion derived from religious scriptures and proceeds in search of proof of those revelations. However, a lot of the industrialized world's medical knowledge comes from the scientific testing of traditional remedies, practices and beliefs, particularly the herbal medicines of tribal societies. Another example is the non-western medical technique of acupuncture, which is generally considered effective by physicians who reject the Chinese theory of the life energy "chi" and how it is said to flow through the body. Precisely why acupuncture works has no commonly accepted scientific explanation, but that it does work has been scientifically verified.

There is, in Panamanian popular culture, a prejudice against things Asian, which is matched by a reverence for gadgets, chemicals and methods considered to be technologically advanced. The inappropriate use of products and technologies from industrialized societies is one of the features of Panamanian rural culture.

So has Chiquita dumped incurably diseased plantations on its former workers? Is the eventual cure going to be replanting with some new natural or genetically modified monoculture? Will the blight be fended off with holy smoke and watering with its ash? 

The cure that's used, if there is to be one, may end up being chosen on the basis not only of what works, but on what a hand-to-mouth cooperative of hungry banana workers can afford. It might also depend on which advice that agricultural experts whom they trust convinces them that it's the "most advanced" solution.