The press release below from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization should be of prime concern to monkeys worldwide. But some simians, I gather, prefer leaves or oranges.
As for my duck, the large, starchy bananas that come with labels from Dole and Del Monte don't really fit his bill. They look clean and pretty but taste as bland as raw potatoes. And one can hardly imagine them holding up to the batter and bath of oil that turns the local Pisang Emas – an unremarkably small, often dirty-skinned and creamy fruit – into a scandalously sweet snack best accompanied with a spicy sauce.
Other banana varieties, out of the thousands that bless this archipelago, include the spotty-skinned Pisang Keling or 'Tamil banana', which Indonesian cook and writer Sri Owen notes is a prized eating fruit. The Pisang Kepok is a flattish, stubby banana best suited for cooking, while the Pisang Raja is a reddish fruit that fries well. One variety that my duck has never encountered is the Pisang Klutuk or Pisang Batu (Stone banana), which Sri Owen describes (in her out-of-print book Indonesian Food and Cookery) as containing many small crunchy seeds that bestow a nutty flavour to Indonesian rojak.
The sheer rarity of seeds in cultivated bananas, while a boon to dessert lovers, may well prove to be a genotypic Achilles heel, as individual trees of most varieties are essentially clones, with new strains emerging as a result of rare, spontaneous reshufflings of genomes (and chromosome counts) during vegetative propagation. Much of the fruit sold in the developed world is shaped by market expectations of a mass-produced, uniformly flawless commodity and the intensive plantational logic of massive economies of scale. The result is a vulnerable homogeneity that could spell disaster should crippling pathogens emerge. But all is not lost, however, as the divergent gene pools preserved by small-scale growers or sheltered in nameless forests could offer resistance and resilience. But even this fount of mutational strength may well fail to withstand the blunter drive for more immediate returns that trades off present gains for a future that may well be fruitless.
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Concern at vanishing bananas
FAO urges search for wild banana species
Rome, 3 May 2006 - Shrinking numbers of wild bananas in India, the world’s premier producer, are causing concern at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. FAO is committed to preserving agricultural biodiversity.
The first session of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which came into force in 2004 under the auspices of FAO, will take place from 12-16 June in Madrid.
India is the world’s biggest banana grower, with an annual production of 16.8 million tonnes, or over 20 percent of total world output of 72.6 million tonnes in 2005.
But overexploitation and the loss of forests as a result of encroachment and logging, slash-and-burn cultivation and urbanization are causing a rapid loss of wild banana species that have existed in India for thousands of years. Among them are the ancestors of the Cavendish variety, the large, pulpy dessert banana which currently accounts for virtually all of world trade, amounting to nearly 20 million tonnes a year.
Cooking bananas and plantains – eaten fried, boiled, baked or chipped – are the staple food of 400 million people in the developing world, while bananas are also used to make fibres and beer. In India, they play an important role in traditional medicine.
Bananas are the world’s most exported fruit and the fourth most important food commodity on earth – after rice, wheat and maize – in terms of production value.
Preserving biodiversity
“The Indian subcontinent has made an enormous contribution to the global genetic base of bananas,” says FAO Agricultural Officer NeBambi Lutaladio. “But due to ecosystem destruction, it is probable that many valuable gene sources have now been lost.
“That could cause serious problems because bananas, particularly commercial varieties, have a narrow genetic pool and are highly vulnerable to pests and diseases.”
In the 1950s, the then dominant commercial banana, Gros Michel, was destroyed by Panama disease. Cavendish, which resisted the disease, was introduced then.
Mr Lutaladio pointed out, however, that small-scale farmers around the world grow a wide range of bananas that are not threatened by diseases currently threatening commercial bananas.
Exploration
India’s lost bananas include a variety which conferred genetic resistance to the dreaded black Sigatoka fungus disease that devastated plantations in the Amazon and elsewhere. Only one clone of the species, whose scientific name is Musa Acuminata spp. Burmannicoides, remains at the Indian Botanic Gardens in Calcutta.
Historically, it was Alexander the Great who put bananas on the map in 327 BC when, during his invasion of India, he reported eating and enjoying them.
The name banana derives from the Arab banan, or finger. Arab traders were responsible for introducing the plant to Africa, while it was the Portuguese who took bananas to the Caribbean and Latin America.
yes, i do not particularly enjoy my pisangs. lol unless they come fried of course...
maybe this is because my mom only feeds me DEL "EVIL" MONTE! :@
now i know why.............
too bad there are no platanos (or plantains) in singapore... we tried to find but dun have
cant wait to go back to chiangrai, my food diversity haven where corn comes with spots of purple because no picky farmer and genetist decide that they cannot stand anything with "blemishes"
ah yes, monkey enjoys her afternoon snack of roast corn straight from the coal stove. *anticipates*
Posted by: monkey | 05 May 2006 at 12:36 AM
Eugh....I hate pisangs!
Posted by: Shalini | 10 November 2006 at 10:54 AM