When will we ever learn?
When you plant monoclonal crops at any scale you are asking for pathogens to evolve to destroy them. In evolutionary terms,
a banana clone cannot outrun a pathogen. Bananas ought to be planted at any scale only in polyspecies, polyclonal settings.
The only solutions - if you want to continue planting large assemblages of a single clone - are:
(1) to breed new versions rapidly. This
can't be done with banana;because of the long cycle time and the (still) virtually unknown genetics.
(2) develop even more precisely lethal, expensive pesticides. This takes time and adds cost to the production.
Africa's mistake is listening to conventional wisdom. Africa has shifted from peasant cultivators practising subsistence farming to commercial monoculture farms catering to vast urban markets.
Africa (and the rest of the tropical world) needs to:
(a) plant at least 20 varieties in a plot.
(b) when a disease like FOC hits; destroy the mat; ameliorate the soil with silica etc.; and
plant a non-banana species in the spot.
(c) teach farmers to produce value added products - either on the farm or in a related enterprise integrated vertically. A generous portion of the value added must accrue to the farmer.
(d) have its agronomists & pathologists STOP reading from Western metropolitan textbooks; or being brainwashed...oops! er, - educated - at Western Universities.
shannon
shannon.di.corse@gmail.com
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