Say Goodbye to the Banana
"Black sigatoka" probably means nothing to you, but if you were a banana, it is a phrase which means the End of Days for you. The Cavendish banana is the single variety which is now enjoyed by most of the Western world when they peel into the yellow fruit and black sigatoka is the fungal disease which is wiping out the fruit. Panama disease, a type of soil fungus, wiped out the Gros Michel variety of banana in the 1950s, and science came through with a solution in the Cavendish. Howeve, much like the Gros Michel before it, the Cavendish is an evolutionary dead-end, sterile and hugely unresistant to diseases. There isn't much that can be done and scientists are predicting that the banana may be exist within ten years.
I'm about six months behind on this story (which can be found at BBC Online and at the Globe and Mail), but didn't want to wake up one morning and find them gone at the supermarket.