Gotta’ split; the time for action is coming soon.- January 29th 2008

Gotta’ split; the time for action is coming soon.- January 29th 2008
What is the banana plant? Surely a vegetable? It must be a fruit... It is, by strange point of fact a grass!! In many countries the banana is a staple of the local diet, as is for example the case in Uganda, just one example of many where a visitor will find people eating bananas in a delectable multitude of methods of preparation... from barbecued to mashed and used in a stew.
How important are bananas to the GLOBAL food supply? Well, the humble banana is actually the fourth most relied upon food crop, only trailing such heavy weights in human edible consumables category as maize, wheat, and rice. The banana we know today is very different from the banana that was available just several generations ago; this is not surprising when you know that there are thousands of varieties of bananas in existence. The “normal” type that we are used to seeing in our groceries and markets selling for an average of about thirty eight cents per pound is known as the Cavendish. This species replaced the Gros Michel, which was a susceptible to Panama Wilt disease, which was a fungal blight causing widespread destruction of banana crops, and eventually leading to unacceptable losses, forcing banana growers to move to growing the less flavourful Cavendish.
Bananas are a Colonious species. Much like the Europeans and their pseudo-successors the Americans, bananas spread their influence in a very similar manner.
The reproduction of bananas is a clonal process, they do not “reproduce” in the patriarchal euro-centric manner of Sexual reproduction, but instead by spreading runners, which will then asexually form into fully separate (but genetically identical) individuals. This throwback reproduction method and the case study of the banana should give us a lesson from Allah; a WARNING from the evolution of life, to the educated of today, about the prescient, and tragically under elucidated dangers of today’s “Green revolution”... a world where all of our foods are of one genotype... a world where as soon as there is any type of calamity, any blight, we are delivered to doom... In an empty breadbasket?
What about today? If bananas are so vital to so many of the World’s most at risk peoples, what are the dangers that face the people of today, who need to find a meal to eat tonight? Thanks in large part to such unjust, corrupt, and ethically corrupt corporations as United Fruit creating massive industrial farms where diseases are able to mutate, and evolve, becoming able to spread with the greatest of ease even to the non commercial varieties, there is very little hope for the banana being able to remain the staple food it currently is. The question to ask is not how much is that banana in the window, but what will we replace it with? I speak not for the affluent and over privileged west, for whom I am all but certain Monsanto will genetically engineer a super-banana with built in GMO pesticide (now with EXTRA cancer causing goodness) and all for a low, low cost... perhaps similar to sending men to the moon.
Who speaks for the poorest people in the world, those who subsist on the banana, and without which will fall into starvation extremely rapidly. For in today’s media saturated world, there is a Monsanto plug, or united fruit plug, an Arthur Anderson plug, a Chiquita plug (etc ad infinitum) played for us virtually daily. The reason we as humans are deficient today is because we allow ourselves to be bombarded by bombastic advertising, all convincing us that our over consumption and wastefulness is nothing but natural... all while we see perhaps one clip a month of an exotic locales, and 99 percent of the time in the context of “how violent, backwards, idiotic, or idiosyncratic” the culture in question “really” is.

When Hurricane Mitch blew through Honduras, in its wake was a trail of destruction, unemployment and eventually violence as a stunning 100 percent of the countries banana crops were wiped out. Further to this seventy five bridges out in total, making access by police and military all but impossible. This unemployment, in collaboration with the breakdown in civil services, led to a resurgence of “banditry”, perhaps one of the earliest boons for La Mara Salvatruca’s first ventures from El Salvador into Honduras.