Yes, We Have No Bananas! We Have No Bananas Today!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Can the absurd Matt McGrath get any more absurd?
Bananas are set to get more expensive as climate change hits a much-loved fruit, one of the world’s top experts from the industry tells BBC News.
Pascal Liu, senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, says climate impacts pose an "enormous threat" to supply, compounding the impacts of fast-spreading diseases.
The World Banana Forum meets in Rome on Tuesday to discuss the challenges.
Some UK shops recently experienced banana shortages due to sea storms.
The UK alone imports around 5 billion bananas ever year, with around 90% sold through the major supermarkets.
Last week saw shortages of bananas in several UK supermarkets, which retailers said were down to storms at sea, delaying supplies.
Most consumers won’t have noticed, according to Prof Dan Bebber from the University of Exeter, who has studied efforts to make bananas more sustainable.
"The supply chain fluctuates but the UK is actually quite good at buffering those types of effects," he told BBC News.
"Mainly, because the ripening centres can accelerate or decelerate the rate at which they ripen the bananas when they arrive, which helps to buffer those types of fluctuations."
But while banana supplies can cope with short-term weather events like this, experts are concerned about the growing threats from a warming world, and from the diseases that are spreading in its wake.
"I think climate change is really an enormous threat to the banana sector," said Mr Liu of the World Banana Forum, a UN umbrella group that brings together industry stakeholders including retailers, producer countries, exporters and research institutions.
As well as severe weather impacting production, bananas are sensitive to temperature rises which could wipe out crops in some locations.
Perhaps the biggest immediate threat is the fact that rising temperatures are helping to spread disease.
The one causing the most worry is Fusarium Wilt TR4, a fungal infection, which has moved from Australia and Asia to Africa and now to South America.
Producers are also facing pressures from rising costs of fertilisers, energy and transport as well as problems in finding enough workers.
Taken together with the impacts of climate change on supply, prices in the UK and elsewhere are likely to go up – and stay up.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68534309
Since the absurd McGrath has invoked the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, maybe he should actually have quoted their own data, which shows banana production at an all time high in 2022. Output has actually doubled in the last twenty years, DESPITE global warming.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Hmmm, thought bananas like warm weather, with lots of CO2 for optimum growth? Yet another totally bananas story
A shortage of bananas should be OK with the eco zeolots. I read of one such who said she had stopped eating them because they gave her flatulence and thus increased her greenhouse gas emissions!
I actually believe that
just a load of old wind . .
No evidence rising temperatures are “helping spread disease” either. How exactly would rising temperatures make a fungus spread from Australia?
So apparently we need a banana expert to tell us that if supply decreases, prices go up.
Will supply decrease? If stuff that decreases supply happens, then our banana expert says it will.
Good job we have such experts.
Farming anything requires tractors and machines which need DIESEL. Our Govts have forced the price of DIESEL up and thus ALL food is getting more expensive. Simple. More plentiful oil and diesel = cheaper food.
UN and expert – a very rare combination.
Quite the contrary. When the UN hires you, you become an instant expert.
The very definition of oxymoron!
I am sure it was a story they meant to use for Brexit of Trump but forgot so they’ve recycled it.
maybe it is racist to eat bananas?
I have known for years that Cavendish bananas all come from one plant, propagated by cuttings, the fungus is slowly killing them and they have been looking for a new plant to resist the fungus. Nothing to do with climate change.
very similar scenario to the Irish potato famine where the majority of potatoes being grown were of one variety and so subject to potato blight.
It’s much worse – bananas are clones, so no variety at all.
The BBC brings to its news item all the authority of a declining regional newspaper. Today it led at 8.00am with some trivia about a photograph that may have been photoshopped by someone living in Kensington or Windsor or Mayfair.
But their news has no mention yet of the fire at Gatwick airport car park .
So they are probably waiting for someone who will say it was definitely not an EV .
I think that they found a diesel light truck to blame. Not sure time required to verify is worth the effort.
Fruit? Banana trees are herbs and have berries …, but it’s BBC …
Yes, they are banana plants, not banana trees. BBC Verify fail yet again.
My bad, but you missed my point …
It is technically correct that banana plants do not meet the definition of trees, because they are not “woody.”
Fruits are growths on a plant which contain one or more seeds.
Berries are fruits which grow from a single ovary. Bananas are berries and therefore fruits.
The bananas we eat have been especially developed so that the seeds in them are not a problem for consumption of the fruit. The seeds are reduced to tiny black, immature dots. One may call them seedless, therefore, but this artificial condition can hardly be said to change the nature of the plant.
I do not think bananas are especially healthy, as they are 75% water and 25% starch and sugar.
The article, of course, is silly. The CAGW gang are parodies of themselves and seem bent on becoming parodies of their former parodies of themselves – if that is possible. At some point people may wake up, or simply become bored. As happens with a much loved sit-com, when you suddenly think to yourself: “Why am I watching this rubbish? It hasn’t been funny for years.”
Shouldn’t Expert, read as “Expert”😒?
One can buy the corms (rhizomes) and some produce plants just 4 m. tall with fruit only a little bigger than a large person’s thumb. I grew one in a large container. When it touched the ceiling at home, I took it to the local university and placed it inside the glass doors of the building where my wife taught. A great learning experience.
“…glass doors…”
Was that a revolving door? Did you do it to annoy?
Output has actually doubled in the last twenty years, DESPITE global warming.
They are meeting in Rome on Tuesday to fix that.
Remember, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation is tasked with controlling agriculture worldwide. Production is not a goal.
BBC has no credibility with so many people precisely because of BS climate propaganda like this. How to ruin a world class media organisation in one generation.
Notice the similarities to Brandon and his (appalling) State of the Union speech. For the lefties facts do not matter. Black is white left is right and up is down when you are into mind control. The masses are too stupid to check their (BBC)lying ( there is a thing, WHERE ARE THE FAMOUSLY IMPARTIAL BBC “FACT” CHECKERS giving their opinion of this garbage?) Oh of course they ONLY check anything which does not agree with or questions this and the other frauds they were set up to defend.
McGrath cannot be so dull witted. He knows opinions and feelings trump facts every time and anyway, he will suffer no consequences if he is challenged, after all he is “only quoting what an expert said”. As he claims to be a journalist, even 10 years ago that would not have saved him but in this time of universal deceit, brownie points are all you get when you would sell your granny to get your snout in the trough.
My comment at Cliscep earlier today before Paul’s article appeared here:
https://cliscep.com/2021/08/19/lets-play-only-connect/#comment-150358
Is anyone bothered? People with real jobs and real lives can see through such trivia.
Can the absurd Matt McGrath get any more absurd?
Get more absurd a rhetorical question I assume.
Well it must be both serious and true if a UN spokesman has stated that this is the future for bananas, after all, has the UN ever lied in the past.
That BBC article is so absurd that I keep thinking of the ‘banana splits’ kids TV show from the 1970s
“The supply chain fluctuates but the UK is actually quite good at buffering those types of effects“
Does that mean that they have discovered warehouses?
As the article implies, they are actually quite smart. Bananas are picked unripened and transported on reefer. Thry are stored in separate rooms in the warehouse and “awakened” with ethylene which starts them ripening, thrn the ripening is controlled by temperature to match demand. They can thus not waste bumper crops and smooth out dips in supply.
The banana may be doomed but Scotland’s electricity supply is secure!
The number of giant batteries being installed in Scotland is expected to increase dramatically as part of the move towards renewable energy.
It can supply the grid with 50 MW of electricity – which is about 4% of the capacity of Torness nuclear power station in East Lothian.
The battery can supply electricity at full power for an hour before having to be recharged.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd180263w7no
Scotland leading the world ….not really, everyone is going to get cold and the energy will be expensive
Well I wrote about that a couple of weeks ago or so Inverness Football team ICT having grief with HRC ( Coonsil) about getting permission and then not … to have a Battery to create income ….
Only need about 6000 of this particular one to keep Scotland going for 3 days during a ni wind period in the first quarter of a year.
If Matt McGrath were a real environmental science journalist he would know that the topical « banana » story of the moment is this one in Factuel . . .
Pesticides : le chlordécone, ce scandale made in France . . . Derrière les décors de plages idylliques et de nature luxuriante, la Guadeloupe et la Martinique cachent des sols, des eaux et des habitants empoisonnés par le chlordécone, l’ingrédient actif utilisé pendant des décennies dans les pesticides pour lutter contre le charançon du bananier dans les bananeraies.
https://factuel.media/argent-public/articles/pesticides-le-chlordecone-ce-scandale-made-in-france_tco_20634385
which Opera translates to
Pesticides: chlordecone, this scandal made in France. . . Behind the scenery of idyllic beaches and lush nature, Guadeloupe and Martinique hide soil, water and inhabitants poisoned by chlordecone,the active ingredient used for decades in pesticides to combat the banana weevil in banana plantations. …
The Banana Forum? Who knew that was a thing?
I suppose they have to think up something to talk about, otherwise what would be the point, and where would they get their airmiles?
An early April Fool, surely!
Amazing how many of the experts most concerned about climate change impacting any particular thing are experts working for a UN department covering that particular issue. With little evidence that said expert has any worthwhile experience in that particular field.
My older brother told me a half-century ago that car dealerships don’t teach car salesmen the business until they have been on the job for over a year, as it makes it more difficult for them to lie.
UN ‘experts’ are experts at lying.
When ambulances drop off at A&E they are usually in an area with a canopy over.
Consider one running our of power whilst waiting to drop off. You cannot tow an electric vehicle, they need to be lifted, so how do you do that with a canopy over?
God forbid one exploding into flames taking out a large part of A&E and waiting ambulance with patients on board.
I do hope this never happens.
Why isn’t our minster of common sense on the job?