Food Security and Global Risks

Sky News, The full story first. Ed here, Before we start, just a reminder, you can become a member of our suubbscriber club, which we're calling More Stuff Matters by becoming a Sky News insider With the subscription, you'll get each new episode a week ahead of everyone else, exclusive bonus episodes, and access to our community Forum where you can chat with the Stuff Matters team, other listeners and ask us questions for future Q and A's To subscribe, go to skyneews. com forward slash stuff matters. And if you use the code stuff thirty three that's ST U F F three three you get a third off your first yearly subscription. So go ahead, join our club. We would love to have you You can find the terms of the subscription in the show notes, rightight Let's get on with the actual podcast Sse now if we of Yeah, and we're going round roundab that is sponsored That's me and my old friend Harry, also a journalist on a day trip to a very exciting destination Exciting for us And there's lots big glories all parked to in a layby and then there's a UPS supply chain. this is fascinating. there's a UPS supply chain operation. I genuinely think it' fasal The modern global buildings that look like open by a minor politician in Maggie Thatcher's second government Yeah just to date it. Then We finally arrive. Here we are we' p putting up. I'm gonna admit, not on the face of it, a very exciting place. I mean it's a big, big grrey box It looks like a reception to a quite low rent budget hotel on the front. That's why so much Park. Through the windscreen, we can just make out a hint of the adventurers awaiting us. There's a logo saying fives. You wouldn't know what they saw No. I mean, yes, it's yellow, but it's also blue. It could be could be anything. Ah, But it's not just anything Inside that big gray box is two thousand tons of bananas Okay, strictly speaking, it's only about one thousand six hundred tes of bananas. ill thirteen million bananas Eespecially a lot of banasas that have only just arrived from Costa Rica Nicaraguula Ecuador and they're being ripened and labeled and they're going to be sent out to supermarkets of Great Britain At this point, you're probably thinking, hold on Ed, a whole hour about bananas Trust me, their rise to dominance is a pretty epic saga and it takes us to some unexpected places even more exciting than Coventry We will cover a terrifying genetic disease spreading around the planet fast, a CIA backed military coup in Central America, even an underground nuclear lab. On top of all of that, there is at least one incredible banana fun fact More importantly, the story of bananas, it's about how we've constructed vast labyrinthine supply chains to keep us fed It's about our vulnerability to disaster about how we might just be on the edge of an extinction level event. Marry, you ready for this? I'm so ready ' let go. is this is Britain's banana center Cway and you're listening to Stuff Matters, a podcast from Sky News, where we take an object, crack it open like an atom, or say for a walnut, though I guess this time we're peeling it and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. In this episode, it's Ban us. By the way, if you haven't done it yet, make sure you follow the Stuff Matters feed in your podcast app notifications about every new episode, and you can listen to all the other ones that we've made. They aren very fun, I promise you Alloy Let's get on with it h Shall I just say this is Harry Wallop and do all that stuff and then say how we know each other and we chat a bit about that? Okay, all right. We'll get back to our very exciting trip to Coventry in a moment. but first, Harry and I have some other fruit related business to attend to I'm here with Harry Wallup.. Hello. I would classify you as a friend as well as a You've steppedross the threshold of my house, which is quite a rare thing for someone I work with. because I'm quite weird. Not being friends with people I work with. Well I'm honored. We were kind of raised journalistically in this cauldron of the slightly terrifying city office at the telegraph with a slightly terrifying boss We've known each other for basically twenty years. you just wed it out? It's over twenty years? Over twenty years now. Harry is a fantastic journalist who started off doing, let's say conventional journalism.. I was a proper newspaper reporter. And now I still write for newspapers, but I've essentially achieved what I want to do, which is writing very long glossy pieces about food chains. Yeah. Which sounds boring, but it's not I want to know where my food comes from Thank than than God for you, Har So how it covers all sorts of things And he has specifically, he's done a lot of work before award winning work on a particular fruit. What was it that brought you to bananas in the first place? I came to bananas because I was going on a tour around Tesco with I think the then boss of Tesco, an idle chit chat as you do as a retail journalist. You say, what are your top five best selling products? And he said, o, it's bananas And I said You sell more bananas than semi skinmed milk or sliced white bread. You went, Yes. And it's like, wow, that's so weird that just lodged a thought in my head I need to know more about how the banana became so important to British families Because my father famamously remembers like lots of people in his generation, he's nearly eighty of when bananas came back to the UK after the war. And it was a massive deal because they were so unbelievably exotic But it's now become the most staple product. It's moved so far in the space of what just three generations from exotic fruit completely staple food product that people don't give much thought to What I love about this is it's also about supply chains. It's about taking something exotic. bring it from the other side of the world to here and doing it with something that's fresh And that doesn't have that long a shelf life And so it's quite A mechanism is quite a machine to make that happen So how is it that this tropical fruit that has grown halfway around the world is so popular Okay, so why it's so popular in the UK and indeed across most of Europe is primarily because it's incredibly cheap. You can go into a supermarket now. The price as we're recording is around about seventeen pence for an individual banana The cheapest apple you can get from a supermarket is thirty five pence. and oranges are also about thirty pence So How is that possible you can get all that nutrition and it is, so it's cheap. it's incredibly nutritious Very good. Andandy Murray famously with a banana, you know in between the other thing, so they're cheap, they're nutritious, they're convenient is think of any other fruit that you can eat walking down the street while being on a telephone call. It's just not possible. You can't eat an apple because it gets messy, sticky fingers. You gott to peel an orange. It has its own packaging. Indeed, it does. so it's in lunchbxes so they're cheap' good for few, what's not to like They also have this kind of fascinating history, which is part of the explanation for why they are so cheap these days and part of the explanation for why you are able to go into your supermarket any given day and get a banana fresh from the other side of the world And that goes back to the history, the history of this supply chain And so if it's all right with you, Harry, I would like to take you through some of that history with someone that we've been talking to recently. the only person in the world who's possibly slightly more expert on bananas than Harry Wallet My name is Marcelo Bucellli. I work at the Gese College of Business University of Illinois Marcello studied at Stanford, taught Business History at Harvard Business School decades researching bananas and he says bananas are Revolutionary The banana became the first available fruit in the Northern hemisphere all year long. Think about that for a second. Bananas were the first produce that wasn't just seasonal. Another first in the banana industry is that it was the first international vertically integrated industry in agriculture and history, in the sense of owning different segments of the value chain in different countries Vvertical integration, basasically what that's talking about is that every different part of the business is done by that same company. So the growing, the cutting, the shipping, the ripening, and then the distribution as well And it's extraordinarily unusual even these days to have that all within one company Bananas also played this kind of huge role in reshaping large swathes of Latin America where this brand new industry put down its roots In the first half of the twentieth century, there were countries like Honduras that depended on banana exports for eighty percent of their economy. Most of those exports went to one single country, which was the United States. And most of those exports were conducted by one single firm, which was the United Frit Company United fruit company. haveave you heard of the United Fuit? yeah in the banana world, United Fruit are a huge and dare I say sometimes malignant force. Really? Well, growing up in Latin America. I was born in Venezuela, I grew up in Chile and in Colombia and Pil and Ecuador. Family discussions around the dinner table or in books like Sienanel's D Solidadundred Years of Solitude invvariably, they keep returning to the issue of America's interventions south of the border And it turns out That story was tightly intertwined with the story of Bananas and the United Fruit Company There was this awareness of its operations in the air But later on in life, I realized there was not much actual academic research on the company So Marcello decided to be the one to change that. So he begins his research at the very beginning of the modern banana era Yeah, the very first bananas arriving to the United States were imported in the early eighteen seventies They were a luxury good. They were part of the menu of luxury hotels because they were such a delicacy and such a strange fruit Then between the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, there were two Bostonian entrepreneurs. Their names were Loreno Dowbaker and Andrew Preston, created a corporation called the Boston Fruit Company. And the reason why they created it was that between eighteen seventy and eighteen ninety nine Different people created one hundred and fourteen banana companies and only twenty two survived. Now there were been of many attempts at selling bananas in the US, but they were failing because just coordinating all of those links in the supply chain. So without that kind of vertical integration, that was extremely difficult. So you had the growers in the tropics, youve got the ships, you've got the green grocers in America, so everything had to be kind of precisely timed. If it didn't, then something went terribly wrong They'd arrive rotten the bananas or many of those companies would just go busust because they couldn't get things sorted. But the two guys who started the Boston Fruit Company, they had an advantage one of them fleet of ships, and the other had a marketing network in the US. and so they were able to optimize the supply chain a bit But still, it wasn't enough to go mass market What really permitted the real takeoff of the industry was the merger that they did with another entrepreneur. and New Yorker Minor Keith who came to this business almost by accident Minor Keith. He've heard of Miner. He's famous in the world of bananas. Well he's he's part of that long history of American what called Rbber Barrenons, really, where you discover you almost acc and all of. Yeah you end up having a sort of semi monopoly in railroads or steel or coal and you make a vast fortune. Well Miner Keith ended up with give or take a monopoly in bananas. Okay. He's kind of the Elon Musk of the banana world. Yes, very entrepreneurial Very wealthy, but dare we say not necessarily a force for good Well, so he was in the railway business and he was building this brand new line in Costa Rica in the middle of a jungle And then things got pretty catastrophic pretty fast. I mean, the workers started getting a lot of disease. Around five thousand people died, includluding Minor Keith's uncle and both his brothers, they were both working on the railway line with him. And it's worth just saying at this point, you've got a lot of these projects happening. like the Panama Canal was kind of being built loads of people dying and kind of getting diseases terrible conditions At some point, Keith even got inmates from local prison in New Orleans to work on the railroad There were also some unfortunate Italian immigrants he hired, some of whom basically got lost forever in the Costa Rican jungle It was a total disaster The biggest disaster of all for Minor Keith at least was that at the end of this, when the railroad was opened Nobody used it. And that left Miner Keith with huge debts So what did he do He turned to bananas to save himself. Back when he was still building the railroad He started planting banana trees along the tracks to at least have something to feed the workers with ' this cheap solution. The banana trees growing quickly, each of them bearing lots of fruits And after he realized the railway was a total disaster, he thought well he might as well try to transport and sell all the bananas he planted along the tracks And she little by little started realizing, o my God, I mean like there is some market for this Bananas were selling He actually started competing against their Boston fruit company However, The banks were still after him Things didn't look well So this is where things start coming together. Mina Keith proposed a merger to the Boston Fruit Company The Boston Fuit Comany had the marketing infrastructure in the US. They had the ships and they controlled the Northeastern market of the US Kith, on the other hand, had plantations in Central America, had the railways, and had control of the southeastern market of the US. The United Fruit Company is incorporated as a result of that merger in eighteen ninety nine It' a mega venture which owns every part of the supply chain. plantations through ships, all the way to the marketing and the distribution In the countries where the company grew bananas They're investing heavily in way more than just banana growing. So they've got hospitals and a telegraph communication network The United Fruit Company gained a huge amount of influence in these countries He was known as the octopus in Spanish, partially because of the vertical integration, partially because they started having a strong say in policy making As I mentioned beforehand, a country like Honduras depending on eighty percent of their exports on bananas and that eighty percent was pretty much controlled by United Fruit. and all of them going to the US I mean, a country like Honduras didn't have much room for economic independence So that the tentacles of United Fruit are stretching all the way from America across Latin America It kind of reminds me of, you know during the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs, they were described as this great vampire squid straddling over the entire financial system United fruit were kind of the same They were making loads of money growing and exporting bananas from the region. And that was in large part thanks to the supply chain which revolutionized banana's place in the world First there were the plantations in the tropical areas. They could not open plantations in the US because bananas had to be grown in the tropics. Then they buil the railways that allowed these bananas to be transported quickly to the port And then they own the Great white Fleet this steamship fleet that was specialized on the transportation of bananas from the tropics to the United States the ships were conditioned for The bananas not to rot inside. They were painted white because that would make them cooler and the Great White Fleet eventually became the largest privately owned ship company in the world Th then once in the US, they had this corporation called the Fruit Dispatch Company whose role was marketing and sales. And this meant they were the ones distributing the bananas within the United States When you hear that description of the old supply chain for bananas, it rhymes, doesn't it with the modern day It hasn't changed usually. It's the same idea. You pick your bananas green getet them into a boat as quickly as possible from the farm And then you need to keep them at this perfect temperature whereby they won't rot, but they won't ripen and you then ship them around the world. So United Fruit felt that they should take advantage of their very reliable system, and they knew that unlike their competitors, they could guarantee for American consumers that every banana they bought would be high quality That is why they came with the idea let's brand them. try to differentiate these bananas from other bananas branding, it was a very big deal. That is so fascinating. So a banana. Yeah. what makes a banana so amazing is that it's a basic product. It's a simple product. It's just a banana, but we're going to whack our labor on and say that's a guarantee of quality. So from then on, you've got each of these United Fruit bananas, they come with this blue sticker and a yellow design on it. a woman and a hat made out of bananas And what's the brand name? Chiquita I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say bananas have to ripen in a certain way and when theyed This is an advert from the nineteen forties for Chiquita bananas. It's animated, so picture one of those old school Disney cartoons picture a sort of flirty looking pomorphize banana singing to an audience of stuffy looking men ensits. Bananas are a solid food that doctors now include in baby's diet. And since they are so good for baby we all should try it. CC, CC As you can tell United Fruit going all in on marketing. The problem they needed to solve in the early years is that actually for all that many people like bananas. because Americans didn't know about this fruit and they could be intimidated by its exoticism. So Fruit Dpatch developed marketing campaigns promote the consumption of bananas These were also times the early nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties. Americans were more austere in their consumption patterns So they were really reluctant to throw away food They were only buying the bananas they were going to consume And this is where Fruit Dispatch created new recipes to use banana with One of them, for example, is the so American thing, which is banana bread In this way people could buy more bananas and consume them in different ways Banana bread is part of this massive marketing campa is kind of interesting at this point. You're seeing marketing becoming a bigger thing. Well ye, this is started. We'reort just about to enter the golden era of Madison Avenue, Mad Men. when marketing could turn anything, you know breakfast cereal, tobacco into a a must have product for the American consumer. so bananas are becoming this kind of iconic American products, a key part of Americana like Boy Scouts. What? Boy Scouts. Seriously. With whom, United Fruit Company released some promotional booklers. In which there is this boy with his boy sccout uniform eating a banana The message was if you wanted to give them a snack, this was one of the easiest ways to give them something because you didn't need to pack them because they had their own skin. and well you just put them in their lunchpacks or backpack whatever alsoso they approached schools and developed the idea that this was something good to bring to school as a snack It's a full on promotional offensive and it worked Bananas became massively profitable. They were a cash crop. In other words, they were grown primarily for commercial value rather than for sustenance. By nineteen forty eight, United Fruit Company was totally dominant in the banana sector, with forty percent of the worldwide market and sixty percent of Americas And They were very protective. of their empire More on the darker side of the delightful Chiquita brand coming up soon One of the main countries in which United Food operated in Central America was Guatemala Guatemala had been ruled by dictators for most of the twentieth century until the nineteen forties In nineteen forty four, Guatemala's dictator Jorge Obico was overthrown in a popular uprising And that was a big problem for United Fruit As far as they were concerned Upiko was helpful Now, the country was going to have democratic elections. Anyone could be elected whatever their banana policy In nineteen fifty, in their second free vote, Guatemalans chose this guy Hakawa Arbnd And one of Arbenz's major new policies was agrarian reform. aimed to redistribute lands from big landowners to poor peasas The idea is that any farmable land that isn't being used should be given to Guatemalans who can work it to feed themselves. United Frit was one of the biggest land owners in Guatemala And Arbin told them, lookook I me I'm not going to expropate you. I'm going to buy Your lands at a price that is consistent with your tax returns. It's worth saying, this wasn't lands where United frruit were growing bananas, it was underutilized land. even so United Fruit resisted the reforms. They even tried suing the Guatemala goovernment. Beyond that There was actually little they could do to hold onto the land Here is when United first thought, okay, We need support from Whing. The problem was The Eisenhower White House just wasn't taking bananas seriously enough Penanas were not that important, strategically speaking Guatemala was too small. And the US was fighting the Korean W So United Fruit decided to frame their problem, not just as the Guatemalan president, Albenza's land reform But it is something Gary Cunis. Communism or something like it. in America's backyard The point was to show Guatemala as like a beachfront of the Soviet Union in the western Hmisphere So they started selling the idea that Arbens was a tool of the Soviets. They basically showed themselves as a company that was bringing healthcare, jobs, development, all these things to Guatemala. But if the Soviets and their proxies took power, that would be gone they also produced a documentary that actually you can still find in YouTube called why the Kremlin hates bananas United Fruit has put to useful production hundreds of thousands of acres of otherwise unproductive tropical lands. It has created jobs for thousands of workers. We have skilled management and capital from the North working with the willing hands in the good earth of the tropics. No wonder then Red leaders detest and fear the company that grows ship and markets bananas so successfully very astute strategy because this was the era of the Red Scare Reds under the bed Rads under the bed And so in nineteen fifty four, President Eisenhower approved covert action to overthrow arrbans. The CIA launched a comprehensive operation of psychological warfare. There was a naval blockade, there were anti government radio broadcasts, even threats as well made to op end as backers All of this to intimidate civilians and Guatemalan soldiers to kind of discourage them from defending their democratically elected president when the time came The CIA even found former Guatemalan soldier, outfitted him with arms and money and set them all up as a rebel force to state a coup. Against all events So In june nineteen fifty four, four hundred and eighty soldiers were stationed across a few different countries surrounding Guatemala At eight twenty AM on the eighteh of June The rebel leader, the dictator in Waiting gave her soldiers the command across the border into Guatemala I mean, it was not a big war There are some pathetic or sad images of some people with maches like volunteering to fight for the government. I mean this was not going to work Arans didn't have much of a chance to win that it was just a few days and it was over And Arbence was replaced by a new dictator who then very soon was having lunch with Richard Nixon, was invited to the US as a defender of freedom and all these kinds of things in the years to Come Guatemala became extremely unstable With this new dictator in place, hundreds of former Aben's loyalists were killed in a sweeping wave of assassinations. And United Fruit were allowed to keep all the lands that the now deposed president wanted to take away. This wasn't even the first time United Fruit used their ties to the US government to help protect their business interests. Sometimes they inserted friendly dictators. That's where the phrase banana repepublics comes from Sometimes they got violent. For instance In nineteen twenty eight, when thousands of United Fruit workorers launched a strike in Colombia to demand basic workers' rights The arrmy was sent in And there are estimates that over a thousand people were killed In short Over the decades, United Fruit held a vice likeke grip on Latin America the lucrative global banana business There was one threat, the corporation was basically powerless about There was this disease called the Panama disease that in the nineteen fifties started killing a lot of trees Around the same time as the coup in Guatemala, this mysterious disease started spreading across Latin America, ravaging banana plants destroying millions of dollars worth of banana supply not only unite of fruits business very future Bananas shocking stuff. it's really shocking There's a link between that where we are today, isn't there? Absolutely. We have almost an exact mirroring of what happened in the nineteen fifties now in the twenty twenties This threat that United Fruit were faced with this global disease, it changed everything in the world of bananas. and it continues to ripple out to this day Ironically The reason all of our banana consumption is possible the reason United Fruit were able to industrialize them It's the same reason bananas were threatened with wipe out back in the nineteen fifties And that brings us finally. warehouse just outside Coventry If you're that way inclined Banana Nevana No bananas? very disceptive yes, fresh bananas. actually, it smells of unripe bananas. We're at the start of our tour of FIF's warehouse, and we're being shown around the three stage process every banana goes through by the managing director of FIF's UK, John Hopkins. He gives us the condensed version of the history of FIFS, a fruit import export business basically as old as the United Fruit Company. We started eighteen eighty eight, almost by accident. It was established by a Scottish family, the FIFs from Perth. The owner was a shipper. He had a tea business in Sri Lanka, which was Syon at the time. His wife had teB The only way in eighteen eighty you could get cure for TB was to stay in a warmer climate So he put her into the Canary Islands When he was in the Canary islands, he saw these things called bananas, which he stuck on the top of his ship and he ran them to the UK and he actually got a good buzz from that and a good businessizz from that as a result, it became more important than the tea So So Fifs became all about bananas And it turned into one of United Fruit's biggest global competitors Actually at one point it was even owned by them. but now twenty twenty six. They're part of a big Japanese conglomerate And they've grown to become biggest importer of bananas All of Europe So Isa Banana here And there's a good chance it came via their supply chain, which still kind of resembles that vertically integrated model, the one pioneered by United Fruit. So the growing of the fruit mostly in Latin America, and then Here in the UK, the ripening of the bananas. There's a lot of crates everywhere, green crates, and I'm looking into the crates and I can see green bananas Three stages. First, you've got the intake room. It is another big, relatively low ceiling by the standards of these rooms, warehouse space, where it is stacked nearly to the ceiling with these big cardboard boxes one on top of each other. You can just about peek inside and you can see the skin of green bananas looking rather handsome. So these have comeing over in the last hour or so from Fist pllantations in Latin America. landed in Southampton, they'd driven up here during the day and then they're obviously unloaded here and put into the riening process according to the riening schedule. because what we have in today, we're seting next week Oh by the way, this is where we come back to that fun fact, I promised at the very start. At this stage of the process, the bananas arrive cold, green and rock hard So rock hard that you couldn't even peel them What you can do with it loough is snap it dramatic They just how snnapped it and hard is how hard they are. The fun fact, the first thing I told my wife when I got home later on, W she excited by that? Yes, she was And I'm still excited by it If you smellem And again, you can't smell home on the sound It smells like a cucumber. Yeah. It smells like a cucumber. It does not smell like a banana at all. Unripened bananas It smell like cucumbers Who knew Anyway, back to the supply chain. The next stage of the banan's journey is the ripening room. Now this is the main event Basically It's a long kind of corridor with these very tall kind of lock up garages, each of which is filled or half filled with bananas and the forklift trroughs are just kind of coming and going. It's kind of a constant process as they're loading stuff into the rightening rooms and then taking them out. Inside each of these lockups, there are over three hundred thousand bananas. They're still inside the same boxes they were loaded into on the plantations So no one has touched the actual bananas since then If all goes according to plan No one's going to touch them until they get all the way to your local supermarket This is all to optimize the process, to reduce cost and to protect the banana's condition Deep inside one of these ripening you call them ripening rooms? Yes, Rripening rooms. What's happening as we stand here As we stand here, my bananas are out of control. Sou are Yes, they are until they leave the building, yes That's Dave Former butcher, current banana caretaker. Over to you, Dave Yeah, I'll explain the ripening process. So we try and keep bananas in the building for about seven days. That's a six day ripening cycle on average. That's the most efficient way to ripen bananas. You need the least amount of energy. So the bananas stay enclosed in these ripening rooms for six days The first thing Dave does is to make sure that every banana is roughly the same temperature. so that the ripening process happens at the same speed among all three hundred thousand of them. The simple rule when you ripe bananas is color equals temperature, the last thing that we need is to have three thousand two hundred and forty boxes of bananas in the room. They're all different colours That is how we get such uniformly coloud bananas at the shop. The way they ensure that We circulate ethylene gas. So what we do is put an ethlene generator in this room And then' gasy for twenty four hours. Now like you, I imagine, I was a bit horrified to hear about the use of ethylene, a gas derived from hydrocarbons, crude oil or natural gas But it turns out all citrus fruit. gives off ethlene gas naturally. It's actually a hormone that bananas themselves give off. In this case, it triggers the ripening process, a process that is very carefully managed When you eat your banana, you don't want it to melt in your fruit bowl. you don't want it to be too green either in your fruit bowl. Yes, all of the things we do is about getting you a consistent banana day after day after day. Once the bananas are ripe enough, they are taken to the final section with the ripening center Just obviously this is busy area, so just be careful. All we're doing here is literally laning the yellow bananas that have come through the room laning. we put them in lanes. Okay. Yeah. We're checking for quality, which you can see the guys doing there. And then once they pass their final quality checks, we're labeling them as supermarket labels and they're ready for dispatch you can probably hear All the way through the ripening centre, Harry and I are basically surrounded by a flurry of activity. Forklifts beeping, employees lined up on a conveyor belt topping up supermarket orders, and then forklifts again loading crates onto trucks. it never ever stops Every single one of the bananas here was harvested somewhere in Latin America about three weeks ago E single one traveled on a container ship across the Atlantic, ripened here in Coventry for six days, and arrived in a shop the next day. And also, crucial to the process Harry and I are witnessing, crucial to the supply chain here in Coventry as well as back in the nineteen fifties, is that Every single banana ha here is the same. Geticallyidentical. Genetically identical. Genetically identical There is a simple reason for all the bananas here being the same variety. Copes very well with the shipping It's basically. If the last that two to three weeks weve crossed the Atlantic, we can control it in terms of if we can put it to sleep, we can control it when we get it back this side in terms of riening it and it gives a very consistent product at the other end to the point when you eat a banana, by the colour of its skin, you know what's going to taste like inside. But for all the economic sense it makes to have all the bananas we trade to be the same banana a monoculture. There's also a pretty big downside. It could easily be wiped out by that same disease that nearly destroyed the United Fruit Company, Fives and all the bananas back in the nineteen fifties raising big questions about how secure really is That's coming up Hey, it's producer Jake Don't worry, I'll handang you right back to Ed and this episode of Stuff Matters. But before that, just quickly, you'll have heard Ed mention our Stuff Matter subscribers Club, which you can join by becoming a Sky News insider So costs toll ninety nineents a month for which you get ad free listening, early access to new episodes exclusive bonus episodes, and you can also hang out with me and Ed and other listeners in our subscriber forum To join the club, you can go to skyneews. com slash stuff matters. If you use the code stuff threety three, soays stuff thirty three You can get a third off your first yearly subscription Included in that are also our sister podcasts Electoral Dysfunction with Beth Rigby and our US politics podcast, Trump one hundred When Terms and conditions apply, you can only become a Sky News insider if you're over the age of eighteen and you're in the UK. Subscription, auto renews at a regular price unless cancelled via my account. You can cancel anyt time effective at the end of the billing period. That's enough of me back to Ed So Harry, in that era, the United Fruit Company, it was a very specific variety of banana. What was that banana? It was called the G or the Gross Michelle, depending on your pronunciation. Or Big Michael. Big Mike. Big Mike was its nickname. It was was was in the wild, there are you know, about a thousand different types of bananas. As indeed, there are about a thousand different types of apples and there's hundreds of different types of potatoes. But The entire export market, so therefore, the bananas eaten in America, in Britain, in Europe On the Gross Michellele What was it about the Grocerell? So what made it such a successful export product? You pick it green and you put it on a boat and if you keep it at the right temperature, it will arrive at your destination, be it London, Paris or Rotterdam, in perfect condition. You can then gently ripen it up It tastes nice The skin is thick enough to protect the banana. It's the perfect exper. banana, the perfect banana. And I in a sense this it sounds like it's almost like a kind of just in time we talk these days about just in time supply chains and this is not exactly that. But you to it has to get there just in time. Yeah, that is it is quite similar because it was picked weeks ago on the other side of the world and it arrives into your green grocers in this era and then soon the supermarket in perfect condition. just going from that kind of slightly green, not quite ready to eat, but tomorrow it'll be ready to eat and you take it home and that's Not many products are that perfect. Today Are we still eating Big Mic We are not eating pig mic Big Mic sadley It got wiped out. It got wiped out. And so what is it that made it so vulnerable? Well, it got wiped out by TR one or Panama disease, which is this sort of soil borne pathogen that spreads like wildfire through the soil. And the problem is what made big mices so successful is very easy to grow It can grow in huge quantities and therefore it's very cheap, but you do that by clearing out your rainforest and then planting lots of banana plants All the same variety. Exactly the same variety. And whatever you do is you don't have any other plants there that might attract rival insects or any you know, you spread it with pesticides and you just blast it and you grow it and it's great. So it's a monoculture, classic monoculture like you get with wheat or with sugarcane Be becausecause of that, the banana plants are very susceptible. So once they get infected, that's it. The leaves wilt and the fruit goes mushy and you just can't sell it. It destroys the crops. and it did destroy the crops Thats right the fifties and sixties. it wiped out nearly all banana plantations that previously were there ' a proper crisroper the apocalypse, the bana apalypse is happening in the nineteen fifties. So how did they deal with that? Well, they thought, is there another variety that can tick the same boxes of, You can pick green, you can transport stably in a refrigerated ship and it will arrive in three to four weeks on the other side of the world and be in perfect condition to rien up. Be that's the point So bigig m was perfect for the supply chain. Yeah. It was an economic it was an economic of delicious bananas that you can eat in India, in Ghana, in Ecuador. you can go to the tree, you can pick, you can eat and go gosh, this is amazing But the moment you put it on a boat, forget it They just don't survive So they needed to find a replacement, something with that kind of perfect goldilocks, you good for trade, but also tastes quite nice. And I'm guessing they found something. They did. It existed. It was being grown, but not in massive commercial quantities They didn't have to go off and do any magic you know sort of science to it. It was there. It grew incredibly well, A in plantations and it transports it very well and it was called Cavendish It doesn't sound very Latin American orerri. like Gross Michele or you know the Monzando or the blue, whatever. No. So why is it called the Cavendish An amazing story Basically all the bananas we now eat in the Western world in America and in Europe and any banana that's exported is now the caavendish comes from Derbysishh So littleittle Old England is crucial to the history of banana Even all those bananas that we saw in Coventry They were all that variety, the Cavendish So how do you grow it in Derbysshire back in the nineteenth century You're growing it in an amazing greenhouse, a greenhouse built and designed and looked after by someone called Joseph Paxxton So here is this incredible classic Victorian Polymath. He's an engineer, he's a botanist He's a genius and he's fascinated by plants. and the Duke of Devonshire at the time is also fascinated by plants. This is the era when people would pay In modern day money terms, thousands of pounds for a single pineapple Okay Exotic fruit this realestate historian area is it? No, we're talking thisort of regionally England. And so the glasshouse has become a massive deal because people realize if you get a really high quality greenhouse, you can grow all sorts of exotic plants and orchids and what have you. The Duke of Devonshire is big into this and he's very wealthy and he hires Joseph Paxton, this botanist builds these enormous greenhouses that'sswthsworthouse this beautiful, beautiful house in the Dales of Derbyshire It glistens in the sunlight as you drive up because it has gold house or the house itself because has gold on the correnllations Joseph Paxton doing he's paying any tradesman who comes from the other side of the world, they're bringing in coffee or tea. Or can you bring in any interesting plant buys this banana plant that we think came from China. Any thinks I haven't seen this before This is completely new to me. And he names it after his boss which is the Cavendish family, and so it becomes Muai Cavendishi When the time comes in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, when botonists are casting around, looking at all of these different varieties to work out what can replace the Gross Michel Cavendish is the answer a light the Cavendish and it turns out to be perfect. frractionally smaller than the groc Michele fractionally less tasty some people say. notot as intense a flavour, but it's a pretty decent banana and it's very stable. crritically it can be shipped. It can be shipped, it can be packed, doesn't bruise easily, it ripens perfectly. Well, thank go for the Duke of Deventire then And just to be clear basasically Most of the bananas that are sold, certainly in the Western world will be Cavendish. As I understand it' if you don't live a country that grows bananas naturally, you're eating an imported bana and therefore it's a Cavendish It's Cavendish. You're eating Cavendish right now, possibly while you're listening to this podcast. Well, I hope some people are When you talk about the bananas today being genetically identical to the ones, you know, from Joseph Paxson's era Are we back to the same vulnerability that you had with the Gross Michele except this time we've moved on to a different variety? Yeah. Unfortunately, we didn't learn our lessons We never learn our lessons from the past, which was what was the problem with the Gross Michelle? We were growing it in huge monoculture plantations and it was a single. We don't do the same thing again today. We haven't just repeated our We' exactly the same thing if not on a bigger scale. because of course modern farming requires scale. For it to be cheap, we need scales. You need these huge plantations, you need pesticides, you blast, anything that might naturally stop The disease and the disease has started as we now TR four. So back in the fifties and sixties you had TR one, tropical race one. It's again it's the same idea It's a pathogen that goes through the soil and it just literally destroys the plants And it started in the Philippines in the nineteen nineties. It started to affect plantations Southeast Asiaread. It has spread alarmingly in the last few years. It's very much spread to South America, which is where most bananas growown. So that is a big deal Gosh, so this this is right now we are living through a possible second apocalypse of the banana. Are we about to go through the same kind of disaster all over again? Well, possibly, because it's happened once before it could happen again and we know that thousands upon thousands of hectares of banana plants have been destroyed by TR four On the other hand, there are an awful lot of very clever scientists working on solutions. So what are the possible avenues here? Do we need to find a new banana or is it something else? Well, so at the moment there's no alternative banana. so therefore we turn to science. And the scientific options are genetic modiferied bananas. Because you can quite easily pinpoint the gene that is susceptible to TR four could Change it make it safe And they've done that. they've done that in Australia. There's been key breakthroughs in Australia The problem with genetically modified bananas is that Europe We get freaked out by the idea of GM food Is that where you know all of our eggs are? No. There's another option which China, they think they've cracked, which is actually the sensible in some ways, which is don't grow on monoculture fields Gr another crop alongside it. They're growing a particular type of alleium. It's half leek, half onion s very big spring onionions, I understand it. And they grow them in fields alongside the banana plants And it increases the soil defence against TR four. That sounds pretty good to me. Yeah, it's quite clever There are other slightly peculiar strategies, aren't there? So tell us about those, Harry So I've actually been strangely to the International Atomic Agency in Austria And they think they've cracked method to improve the banana plant and again make it able to defend TR four. with what nuclear bombs? Well, don't joke, Ed. I'm not jo. yeah, they zap it with gamma rays. It is amazing. So what happened is it's called mutagenesis and it's actually been done for over a century They've done it with rice, they've done it with wheat. It's what happenset the bana startop growing tails and things like that No Think about it, in nature, plants adapt to extreme environments. So in drought areas, they learn to cope with less water. and what happens is genes inside the plants get altered And it will take many generations of plants to learn to cope with these harsh environments. What you do in an atomic laboratory outside Vienna, you literally you zap them just a couple of seconds, and you zap the tiny baby plants and you work out what the dosage is and they've been doing it with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different plants and they've been testing them. and they've worked out they can pinpoint the right gene What they claim is they're just speeding up the natural process and they have developed plants are able to withstand TR four and they've already started to ship them out to various bits of the world. you tend towards the Banana optimism camp do you because is there another another route where it's like We are literally not going to those' beautiful hamocks in the front of the supermarket. We're going go in one day and there will be no bananas Yeah, I mean, I think the banana is the number one, not just fruit, but the number one product in British supermarket. So they will find a way to do it, I think, I believe. We may have to pay more for our banana. because we may have to grow them not on vast monocultural fields. We may have to start investing a bit more to make sure that we don't just go around and repeat this all over again But in the end, all of these things to how efficient the supply chain is and basically that the banana supply chain is just super efficient And that efficiency is both the merit of it and it's both the vulnerability. Because of course, what was globalisation? It was mostly getting cheap labor from overseas And we did the expensive added value stuff. Well, that's the banana. All the cheap labour iss done on the farm in Nicaragua or Ecuador, they do the harvesting, they do the putting the labels on the bananas, often putting them into a little you know Morrisonons or as a plastic bag, they put them in the box, they put them in the truck, they take them to the ships. That's all the labour. Once they arrive in the UK, as we saw in the Fice warehouse, In most cases, no one really touches them. There's a forklift truck driver who moves it around a bit, but no human hands, no labor. That's what keeps the banana so cheap The success of the banana is one of the reasons why of all the fruit we eat in the UK Only fifteen percent is grown in the UK. It's near all important, of course a big chunk that is bananas. But also increasingly things like strawberries and blueberries and raspberries, those value added fruit that we're prepared to pay a little bit more money for lots of apples, they all come from overseas and think we're discovering British food chain is terribly vulnerable to shocks. far more than we realize We're discovering that oh my gosh, you know, those floods What it used to be on was a generation, massive flash floods in kind of southern Spain. and it's now happening, we know, that's every ten years, once every three or four years now early twenty twenty six, Southern Spain Northern Morocco just wiped out, you know, And there were gaps on the shelves, again, it's happening more and more. supermarkets are pretty good about hiding it, but it's like, w, we're in trouble here. Potatoes we're getting potatoes now from Egypt. It It's extraordinary? We should be self sufficient in potatoes. But we've decided it's a bit cheaper to get our potatoes grown in Egypt, one of the most sort of water stressed countries in the world and then truck them over land through Europe because it's that bit cheaper. For most people, if it's a bit more expensive It was just not an option And you know, that's kind of fair enough right now. We're in a straightened period. We've had a cost of living crisis. lifeife is genuinely quite tough for many parts of the population So What do we do? We offshore. We outsource more and more of our production to kindind of wherever it's cheap And we make less and less stuff in this country which is Fair enough in one respect, we get cheaper stuff But what if you have some sort of a disaster with trade What if you have a war? What if crops are wiped out by hurricanes or disasters But then All of a sudden Those things that seemed like they were good ideas in the past, and the cheap way of doing stuff Backfire, B time They might sound bananas by now he realize This isn't just a funny fruit total into how our food system actually works Our food security, in the face of all sorts of crises and risks like climate change or war is a big, fascinating subject all of its own. So in a subscriber exclusive bonus episode We have a completely new never heard before interview with a food security expert, a man who designed and ran a war game testing the safety of European food supply reallyally interesting and slightly terrifying stuff Do remember of our club You can hear it now. Next time on Stuff Matters, we are finally taking on one of the biggest, most earth shattering questions of all Why are child seats so difficult to fit in your car Actually, it's about more than that It's about whether they can help explain the collapse in birth rates around the world and what else might be behind the coming demographic impplosion. It's a fascinating sort of detective story I like to you know consider every hypothesis, no matter how bonkers I' like to explore it. And I'm thinking, well, can house prices explain what's going on in Guatemala? or can overdeducated women explain why fertility is now so low in Turkey and Tunisia? Child seats, I'm guessing are just another one of those hypotheses that you've got to look at as Sherlock Holmes Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely Subscribers get the episode a week ahead of everyone else. If you aren't one yet, you can sign up and listen to it straight away. 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