Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “Greening the World’s Most Popular Fruit” by Christine Mlot (@2004 by National Wildlife Federation).

The banana has a huge fan base. Babies love its easy-to-eat-and-digest sweetness; athletes gulp it for potassium-rich quick energy. The banana is popular worldwide, with more than 25 pounds consumed annually per capita in the United States, most eaten straight out of the wrapper. In East Africa, where bananas and their plantain cousins are dietary staples, consumption is seven times that amount.

What the banana lacks, though, is a huge genetic base. The familiar yellow fruit—botanically, a berry— is largely derived from a single variety known as Cavendish, grown on plants that are essentially cuttings, or clones, of the same stock. The lack of sexual reproduction, with its mixing of genes, leaves the crop vulnerable to diseases and pests such as fungi, viruses, bacteria, insects and roundworms, some of which have become epidemic in recent years.

This means that conventional banana production depends heavily on pesticides—and lots of them. Fungicides, for example, may be applied 40 times a year, even though the chemicals lose their effectiveness with overuse. Worse, these highly toxic compounds often drift or run off of farm fields, posing a threat to fish, birds and other species一including humans. Even more poisonous to people and the environment are the nematicides typically used to control roundworm pests. And conventional banana production generates a host of other problems as well－from rivers polluted with eroded sediment and plastic waste to tropical forests razed to carve out new plantations.

These environmental problems, along with historically poor conditions for banana workers, have prompted several organizations to create certification and seals of approval for producers that meet certain environmental and social standards. In addition, a small but growing number of exporters are harvesting organically grown bananas, eschewing agrochemicals altogether. The result: Consumers today have a much greater opportunity to purchase bananas that are friendly to the environment than even a decade ago.

The Better Banana Project, sponsored by the New York—based Rainforest Alliance, is one of the oldest certification efforts. Launched in 1991, it requires producers to maintain health and safety standards for workers and to demonstrate reduced pesticide use and other sound environment practices such as soil conservation and proper waste disposal. Today 15 percent of all bananas traded on the global market are certified by the project. One major global producer has converted all of its Latin American farms to meet the project’s standards.

The Better Banana Project has “improved conditions on all [of that brand’s] plantations greatly,” says an organic agriculture consultant to small-scale farmers in Costa Rica. The use of toxic nematicides, for example, has been halved on certified farms, and tons of blue plastic bags and twine, which once littered virtually all banana farms, have been recycled through the program. In addition, pay and other benefits for workers have improved greatly. Thanks to efforts of project participants, “the banana industry is making a long, slow 180 degree turn,” says the Rainforest Alliance’s Chris Wille, one of the project’s founders. “Now there’s even competition among workers to get jobs on certified farms and competition between farms to see who can have the cleanest and greenest one.”

For pesticide-free fruit, one can choose organic bananas. Though less than one percent of the bananas sold in the United States now are organic, that fraction is growing by more than 20 percent per year nationally and by 30 percent globally, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Certified organic bananas are taking root throughout Latin America, often in drier habitats where harmful fungi don’t occur. The Dominican Republic is the region’s biggest exporter of organic bananas, followed by Mexico and Colombia. Small- and medium-scale growers are even managing to grow organic bananas in Costa Rica, where the fungal disease black sigatoka is a constant problem for large producers. By planting bananas in the shade in combination with other marketable crops such as cacao, these producers can get a modest but pesticide-free crop that commands a premium price. U.S. consumers looking for organic bananas can often find them in natural food stores and even main grocery chains for just slightly more than conventionally grown bananas.

The fruit that sustains hundreds of millions of people is itself slowly becoming a more sustainable crop.