Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Why Bananas are a Parable For Our Times
Johann Hari, Huffington Post
Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.
There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon – in five, 10 or 30 years – the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world – and where they are leading us.
Bananas seem at first like a lush product of nature, but this is a sweet illusion. In their current form, bananas were quite consciously created. Until 150 ago, a vast array of bananas grew in the world’s jungles and they were invariably consumed nearby. Some were sweet; some were sour. They were green or purple or yellow.
A corporation called United Fruit took one particular type – the Gros Michael – out of the jungle and decided to mass produce it on vast plantations, shipping it on refrigerated boats across the globe. The banana was standardised into one friendly model: yellow and creamy and handy for your lunchbox.
… Not long after Panama Disease first began to kill bananas in the early 20th century, United Fruit’s scientists warned the corporation was making two errors. They were building a gigantic monoculture. If every banana is from one homogenous species, a disease entering the chain anywhere on earth will soon spread. The solution? Diversify into a broad range of banana types.
The company’s quarantine standards were also dire. Even the people who were supposed to prevent infection were trudging into healthy fields with disease-carrying soil on their boots. But both of these solutions cost money – and United Front didn’t want to pay. They decided to maximise their profit today, reckoning they would get out of the banana business if it all went wrong.
So by the 1960s, the Gros Michel that United Fruit had packaged as The One True Banana was dead. They scrambled to find a replacement that was immune to the fungus, and eventually stumbled upon the Cavendish. It was smaller and less creamy and bruised easily, but it would have to do.
But like in a horror movie sequel, the killer came back.
… When we hit up against a natural limit like Panama disease, we are bemused, and then affronted. It seems instinctively bizarre to me that lush yellow bananas could vanish from the global food supply, because I have grown up in a culture without any idea of physical limits to what we can buy and eat.
Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea – and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself.
Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent.
(7 January 2009)
Recommended by Big Gav.
‘Peak wood’ gives a history lesson in Abu Dhabi
Terry Macalister, blog, Guardian
‘Peak wood’ scuppered the Roman Empire just as peak oil will strike us, delegates at Abu Dhabi’s World Future Energy Summit hear
—
Bloggging from the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi (“World leaders meet to discuss renewable energy”)
… The local Abu Dhabi Crown Prince is here, but also someone I vaguely remember from my history lessons – The Prince of Orange.
And just as I remember his forebears, the Dutchman – clearly a prince of green – appears to be preaching respectable sedition.
Prince Willem Alexander says our aim should be “nothing less than revolution” with regard to tackling climate change and weaning ourselves off oil.
He also does a bit of history teaching himself, claiming the Roman Empire came to grief partly because it deforested Europe.
The Romans apparently ignored “peak wood” forecasts and used up all their primary energy sources!
(1X January 2009)
Terry Macalister is referring to Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange,, heir apparent to the Dutch throne.
Peak Web?
Netcraft
January 2009 Web Server Survey
In the January 2009 survey we received responses from 185,497,213 sites, reflecting an uncharacteristic monthly loss of 1.23 million sites.
(16 January 2009)
At The Oil Drum, Gail Tverberg points out that
The graph [in the article] certainly does look similar to some others we have seen.” – namely, bell-shaped curves in which we are at the tipping point. -BA.
