Fragile banana monoculture

Hemant Kulkarni
1 min readJul 15, 2020

I watched this video today, and I learned something new. I did not know that all over the world there was, basically, just one commercial species of banana.

This is an example of a blow-up waiting to happen. Nassim Taleb warns against this kind of basic fragility in his works.

In pursuit of profits and better supply of the food crop, we humans have built a fragile system around the banana crop and, given enough time, this will blow up all over the world taking the banana, biodiversity and lots of human lives with it. The video already showcases places where it is happening already. Just one deadly banana disease infectious enough is sufficient.

The system will correct itself and then the world will either have some other banana variant or a robust banana crop system or no bananas at all.

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

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