PARIS: Neither pesticides nor genetic manipulation will save the Cavendish banana from disappearing, says scientist Jean Vincent Escalant, research coordinator for the International Network for Improvement of the Banana and Plantain (INIBAP), following the uproar caused by the recent announcement of this fruit’s imminent demise.

In mid-January, Emile Frison, INIBAP director, warned that the Cavendish, the banana variety most widely consumed in the industrialized world, could disappear within the decade due to the onslaught of the fusarium fungus, against which pesticides have proved useless.

The only option is to find a new resistant variety, Frison said in the article “Going Bananas”, published by New Scientist magazine.

The story made it seem as though Frison is staking bets on genetic modification to save the banana.

However, Escalant said in a conversation with Tierramirica, “New Scientist published a set of opinions apparently in favour of genetic manipulation, and led readers to believe that INIBAP was the source of that information. Which it wasn’t. We are convinced that the conventional crossbreeding methods are the most efficient in the long term.”—Dawn/InterPress News Service.