Solutions Journalism: Going bananas

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A killer fungus is ravaging plantations of the Cavendish banana worldwide. It travels through the soil at lightning speed and chokes the banana plant so its leaves shrivel up and die. The disease is known as Tropical Race 4, or TR4 for short, and it has spread across the globe from Australia, to the Philippines, Pakistan and Mozambique. Now TR4 is widespread across Latin America. In Colombia where 30,000 people are employed in banana plantations, the government declared a state of national emergency when the fungus first arrived on farms in 2019. An international community of scientists is experimenting with different techniques to try to halt the spread of TR4 whether that's through gene-editing, selective breeding or injecting microbes into the soil.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Harry Wallop and this is going bananas.
0:04.0	Oh, look at that.
0:08.0	That's a mango from Pakistan
0:11.0	and these beautiful little gold ones, Gog to Mag gog I don't know where they is that a
0:14.9	plum maybe maybe that's a passion fruit I'm not sure but it's very beautiful my
0:20.6	name's Harry Wallop and I'm a British journalist with a confession to make.
0:25.0	I have an unusual hobby. I collect fruit stickers. I know cool, huh?
0:31.0	I'm just flicking through my album there's a Del Monte from Spain
0:35.6	Marlene which is a from the north of Italy
0:39.3	Suttero it's a hobby that may not make me many friends, but these little adverts for faraway fruit producers
0:46.4	Remind me of the journey that each orange lemon apple or pear has made to get to the fruit bowl on my kitchen table.
0:54.0	The blue whale from France.
0:56.0	There's a cocks there.
0:58.0	A pardo from a spaniel.
1:00.0	Conference pairs from Holland.
1:02.0	And there's one fruit that particularly fascinates me.
1:05.6	Chiquita from Panama and there's fair trade from the Dominican Republic. It's yellow,
1:10.8	bendy and and, mmm, particularly delicious.
1:17.0	What makes the banana stand out is that while you see plenty of stickers for lots of
1:21.7	varieties of other fruits, the banana stickers only represent
1:25.8	one variety. Though there are more than a thousand different types of bananas, astonishingly
1:31.3	pretty much only one gets exported.
	...

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