The bananapocalypse already happened:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana

Eh, they definitely aren't fit for major cultivation anymore, but you can still find them.

I picked up a basket (with a bunch of other varieties) from miamifruit.org a while back. They can't ship a lot of things to California, but if you live elsewhere in the lower 48 you should check them out.

Hence, the article...

The truly baffling thing to me, is I swear one of the hardest emphasized lessons in grade school was on the dangers of a monoculture. And yet, the vast majority of farming seems to just double down on it.

Worse, non-farming does to. So many societies and institutions seem to try and build up the equivalent.

It's just an advanced form of 'hand to mouth' existence, maybe we should call it 'capital to wallet' The fact a crash will come tomorrow doesn't stop most actors from doing what's going to profit them the most today.

I think it is a little more nuanced, in practice. For a lot of amazing progress and such, the short term doubling down on something seems to make a ton of sense. As such, for the individual farmer and all, risky idea. For the town and the society, they can often ride the reward with minimal exposure to the risk.

My personal pipe dream is that we found a way to not load so much downside of risks on individuals. Which seems to be what we do.

* * *

The problem is that monocultures enjoy great economies of scale, and it's extremely difficult to fight the market.

The little farmer who grows a variety of crops is out-competed by the corn growing neighbor who has relatively cheap specialized equipment and seeds available to allow him to work ever larger and more productive fields for year after year. The little guy ends up closing shop before the neighbor gets wiped out by some highly specialized pathogen. As John Maynard Keynes noted, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." Monocultures might be a bad idea in the long term, but for immediate profits they cannot be beat.

The threat of monoculture is overblown.

Yes if your entire society relies on one staple crop that has low diversity and no pest management, you are at high risk, but that is not modern society.

If the cavendish is wiped out, people would barely notice. Even if it happened with corn, it would be disruptive, but not catastrophic. Our food system is too diversified to really collapse from one disease.

I grew up near a statue to the boll weevil. So, exactly. It can happen. Does even. Rubber trees, if I'm not mistaken, are another good example.

Doesn't mean that specialization can't have obvious benefits.

Enterprise, AL?

Yeah. I was actually "close" as in the same State. So, not right next to it. Did visit it, if I remember. (Granted. I "remember" a lot of things I didn't fully do. Maybe we just had a class that talked a lot about it. :D )

The British switched from coffee to tea because their monoculture coffee plantations in what used to be called Ceylon died from blight. Their plantations were the descendants of 6 plants. A disease that affected one coffee bush affected every coffee bush.

The Irish Potato Famine happened because their potatoes were descended from a single handful of potatoes. As a result, a fungus that affected one potato plant affected every other potato plant. About a million people died from that.

The corn blight in 1970 resulted in the loss of 1/3 of the US corn crop. If the weather hadn't broken, up to 85% of that year's crop could have died. 85% of the seed grown back then used Texas Male Sterile Cytoplasm as part of the hybridization process. In response, the US government created and continues massive subsidies for corn production. This is why high fructose corn syrup is cheaper than cane/beet sugar, and why HFCS is so widespread in US food production.

One book that covers the history of monoculture failures like this is Altered Harvest:

https://www.amazon.com/Altered-Harvest-Jack-Doyle/dp/0140096...

One book that covers how prevalent corn is in American food production is Omnivore's Dilemma.

https://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Mea...

The banana flavor used in candies tastes nothing like Cavendish bananas. That flavor was based on the Gros Michel variety that went economically extinct in the 1950s.

> The British switched from coffee to tea because their monoculture coffee plantations in what used to be called Ceylon died from blight.

its quite unfortunate as srilankan coffee is quite good and tragically under appreciated. most locals will serve you nescafe as they think its "fancy"

You bring up a lot of good points. But in regards to:

>...This is why high fructose corn syrup is cheaper than cane/beet sugar, and why HFCS is so widespread in US food production.

As you point out corn subsidies lower the cost for HFCS, but the US also uses import restrictions to keep the US sugar price much higher than what it is in other countries:

>...The US sugar industry receives enormous government support and protection from foreign competition. The sugar program has changed over time, becoming a complex set of rules developed to promote sugar production primarily at the expense of domestic consumers. The program has also affected foreign producers and consumers through import restrictions that have significantly reduced the world sugar price. Since the mid-1970s, as a result of the sugar program, the price of sugar in the United States has been almost twice as high as the price of sugar on the world market in most years.

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/-sweets-for-t...

The problem with bananas specifically is that if you don’t have a seedless product, you don’t have a product to sell at all.

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Banana_cross_secti...

And that means monocultures propagated from cuttings.

It is the same thing as centralization/decentralization. Centralization is more efficient (economies of scale and other things) but more fragile.

I am seeing a renaissance in Apple varieties. Coffea is not a monoculture. Will other fruits and vegetables follow?