Episode 10: How the World Ended Up With a Boring Banana

Tracy Alloway (0:05)

Hello, welcome to Odd Lots. It's Monday, January 11th. I'm Tracy Alloway, Executive Editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Joe Weisenthal (0:11)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal, Managing Editor of Bloomberg Markets.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

Hey Joe, I brought you something. It's sort of a belated Christmas present.

Joe Weisenthal (0:20)

Oh, thanks Tracy, what is it?

Tracy Alloway (0:22)

A banana. Oh.

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

Thanks, thanks so much. Thanks for this banana.

Why did you bring me a banana?

Tracy Alloway (0:30)

Because today we're gonna talk about one of the world's most fragile commodities markets, and I'm not talking about oil. I am of course talking about bananas, the banana market.

Joe Weisenthal (0:40)

I had never even thought before that there was a banana market, or even really thought of banana as a commodity, but why are we talking about it? Why are bananas interesting?

Tracy Alloway (0:49)

Bananas are interesting because they face a big threat in the form of a fungal disease. And as we're about to find out, that disease could end up having far reaching implications for the world's food supply.

Joe Weisenthal (1:04)

Yeah, one thing about bananas, right, is that with like apples, there are tons of varieties in the store, Granny Smith and Fuji or Fiji apples and all these, but there's pretty much just one banana, isn't there?

Tracy Alloway (1:15)

That's exactly right. Not only is there just one banana, the banana that's grown in 95% of the world's crops and most likely the type of banana that you are holding in your hand right now called the Cavendish is actually a clone.

It's a clone of itself, and it's just been cloned over and over and over, so it's very, very susceptible to this fungus, as we're going to find out.

Joe Weisenthal (1:37)

And so because there's just one banana, if it were to get sick, so to speak, that would not be good for the banana eaters and growers of the world.

Tracy Alloway (1:45)

No, it definitely wouldn't, and it would mean that maybe one day you would actually appreciate the banana that I just put into your hands. So here with us today is Dan Kopel. He is author of Banana, The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, and we're going to be talking about the market forces that brought us the Cavendish banana currently sitting in front of Joe, how it got to be there, how we eventually ended up with this monoculture, and the problems facing the world's collective banana crops now.

Dan, welcome to the show. So I want to start at the beginning. Let's go back to 1904, when the banana split was invented in Pennsylvania, and that kicked off a craze for bananas in America, and a huge jump in the number of bananas imported.

Joe Weisenthal (2:39)

Wait, what's the beginning?

Tracy Alloway (2:41)

You want to go back even earlier? Is that what you're saying?

Joe Weisenthal (2:43)

Yeah.

Tracy Alloway (2:44)

Like prehistory?

Joe Weisenthal (2:45)

Yeah, I do.

Tracy Alloway (2:46)

Okay, all right. Let's start at the very, very beginning. Why are bananas special?

Dan Koeppel (2:53)

Well, bananas are, and we're talking 10,000 years ago now, one of the fruits, one of the agricultural products that actually helped humanity emerge from hunter-gatherer cultures and into communities.

Bananas are very easy to cultivate, and it's believed that wild bananas, which are basically inedible and have a lot of seeds in them, that mutant versions of them that were unseeded were taken by these hunter-gatherers and planted. And, you know, when you plant, you have to stay put to watch it grow, so you need to form communities, you need to develop language, you need to develop history so you can pass knowledge on. So the banana emerges very early as the first staple fruit that helps us, you know, literally get out of the jungle and into villages.

Tracy Alloway (3:42)

And the way bananas are planted is kind of special as well, right?

Dan Koeppel (3:47)

Yeah, so, you know, wild bananas, and some of them still exist, have seeds, and they can reproduce like many plants. But what makes bananas so unique is that they also can reproduce when they're seedless, through planting a shoot. A mother plant will fruit once and then give off a daughter plant.

And that generation can go on and on and on for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Joe Weisenthal (4:12)

And apparently the banana is so crucial to humanity that it might have actually been the banana, not the apple that Eve gave to Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Dan Koeppel (4:21)

Yeah, I mean, let me be clear. I am not suggesting or am not not suggesting that the Garden of Eden was a real place. That's a theological question. But if you look at the story of the Garden of Eden as a historic metaphor, Adam and Eve are those hunter-gatherers we're talking about. They live in the garden and they can pick whatever they want, they have no worries.