Hi,
As someone who is actually breeding Cavendish & Gros Michel bananas the old fashioned way, I beg that you folks indulge me.
The problem with the export banana segment of the banana "industry" is that it is extremely oligopolistic.
Thus there has been no initiative to segment the market or to develop products. What passes for innovation in this field is a travesty. When Gros Michel failed, the cartel model dictated that they should simply find a substitute good. They did and it was Cavendish. And they found it good. So they rested.
Anyone with the slightest familiarity with pathogen ecology & evolution would understand that Cavendish was a sitting duck from the start. Any monoclonal culture scheme on the scale of bananas is bound to be unsustainable.
Did the breeders understand this? I'm sure they did. Some of them are actually brilliant people.
But the breeder are, for the most part, an integral element of the system. The systems buys the groceries. The system brooks no radical dissent. The system is broken.
There, I've said it. And there's no recanting here.
Now, on to breeding Cavendish types.
Bust the myth:
Cavendish bananas are extremely infertile. Well, yes,
Cavendish types are extremely female infertile. Don't take my word for it. Hear FHIA's J.F. Aguilar Morán in a paper on FHIA's 21st Century Cavendish breeding initiative.
"On the assumption that Cavendish cultivars have low fertility, the Banana and Plantain Breeding Program at the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Research (FHIA), starting in 2002,
pollinated 20,000 bunches, approximately 2 million fingers, of the Cavendish cultivars ‘Grand Naine’ and ‘Williams’ with pollen from 10 Cavendish cultivars for the development of Cavendish tetraploids. As a result, 200 seeds with
40 viable embryos were obtained, from which
20 tetraploid hybrids were developed."
Whew! 20,000 bunches to get 20 useable progeny. Now that is what I describe as Herculean. Someone give these brave people a medal.
My goodness, FHIA's using 20,000 bunches and poor shannon uses like one.
Actually,
Cavendish types often have rather good male fertility and make correspondingly good pollen donors.
So to my thinking, you pollinate many lineages of seedy diploids, backcross suitable progeny of each line of mating to Cavendish for a few rounds, selecting as you go; then do some full sib matings and look for the (as many as possible) segregants that you want. These would be some sorts of diploid "super Cavendishes" with all the bells and whistles but perhaps a tad too much seed fertility.
You then create numerous seed-infertile secondary triploids and encourage polyclonal culture of these "derived Cavendish" bananas to keep the satanic export dessert banana trade going full steam ahead.
So while I have no real quarrel with transgenic bananas; I just want to point out that we haven't scratched the surface of conventional breeding.
I know for sure that bananas.org contains numerous members of remarkable calibre. So my question is: why don't they stand up and say: "Wait, the Emperor is naked! We have to stop breeding bananas with paper bags over our heads."
sincerely,
shannon
shannon.di.corse@gmail.com