The export banana is one clone, and the last one died of a fungus

The banana of international trade, Cavendish, is propagated by cuttings, so each plant is genetically the same plant. The clone it replaced, Gros Michel, was wrecked commercially by Panama disease.

Wild bananas are full of seeds. The edible ones are seedless, which means they are sterile, which means the next tree is a sucker taken from the last. Gros Michel was the export clone for the first half of the twentieth century. Fusarium wilt, Race 1, killed it in plantation after plantation. The trade switched to Cavendish, which resists that race. Cavendish is what a supermarket sells. It is one genotype, planted by the million, on several continents, so a disease that can beat that genotype can beat the entire export crop at once. Tropical race 4 of the same fungus can. It has been moving.

This is not the end of bananas as a kind of plant. Hundreds of cultivars are grown locally, many of them neither Gros Michel nor Cavendish, and they are food for the people who grow them rather than for a ship. The claim is about the fruit that moves in boxes. It is a clone, it replaced a clone a fungus removed, and it is now in the same argument with a relative of that fungus. Sameness was the point of the system. Sameness is the risk.