ecobites.com

Making your life greener - one bite at a time.

Fungicides are proving increasingly ineffective, but Dr. Frison is looking to biotechnology and genetic modification to save the world’s bananas and plantains, on which half a billion people depend for a staple food.He’s looking in the wrong place.
It’s been shown that soils teeming with soil life prevent outbreaks of diseases and funguses that wreak wholesale destruction on crops, especially the kind of fusarium wilts of which Panama disease is a type. The problem is that lifeless chemical soils fertilized with nothing but mineral macronutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium have no autoimmunity to diseases, whereas rich, organic soils do. Conventional banana growers also use a host of toxic chemicals against pests. Nematodes (destructive soil worms) are controlled with carbofuran, Dasanit, Ethoprop, and phenamiphos. Yet nematodes can be controlled organically by proper tillage, sun exposure, and crop rotations with nematode-destroying Pangola grass. Black weevil is controlled with dieldrin and heptachlor; banana rust thrips with dieldrin, diazinon, and dursban, and banana scab moth with injections of pesticides into the growing stems. Yet all of these are controlled with non-toxic techniques on organic banana plantations.

As for fertilizers, bananas and plantains are heavy feeders. Harvesting five tons of fruit from an acre depletes the soil of 22 pounds of nitrogen, four pounds of phosphorus, and 55 pounds of potassium. Instead of applying chemical fertilizers, if the old plant stems and leaves from one plantation acre are chopped and incorporated into the soil, 404 pounds of nitrogen, 101 pounds of phosphorus, and 1,513 pounds of potassium are returned to the soil. If this material is composted with other organic matter, even more is returned. The result? Under organic cultivation, the soil improves in health, amount of soil life, availability of nutrients, resistance to soil pests and diseases, and its ability to produce extra high quality bananas and plantains.

That’s on the plantations. After harvest, bunches of conventional bananas are floated in tanks of sodium hydrochlorate solution to dissolve the drips of latex sap that can discolor the fruit.

Experiments have shown that fungicide-treated bananas can develop off-flavors. Yet “hands” of bananas (the small bunches we see in markets) are conventionally treated with fungicides by being placed in polyethylene bags with blocks of vermiculite treated with potassium permanganate to absorb the ethylene ripening gas that bananas give off. This allows the bananas to be stored and shipped over a month’s time before they start ripening.

The point is that organic bananas are well worth seeking out because their production avoids a host of toxic chemicals that affect everything from the health of the plantation soils and surrounding ecosystems, to the health of the workers who grow and handle them, to the health of those of us who eat them.

http://organictobe.org/