Fusarium oxysporum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fusarium oxysporum, also referred to as Agent Green, is a fungus that causes Fusarium wilt disease in more than a hundred species of plants. It does so by colonizing the water-conducting vessels (xylem) of the plant. As a result of this blockage and breakdown of xylem, symptoms appear in plants such as leaf wilting, yellowing and eventually plant death.

Interest in Fusarium oxysporum as a herbicide was first raised after the discovery in the 1960s that it was the causative agent in the destruction of the Hawaiian coca population.

The United States government was involved in a controversial program to use Fusarium oxysporum for the eradication of coca in Colombia and other Andean countries, but these plans were cancelled by president Bill Clinton who was concerned that the unilateral use of a biological agent would be perceived by the rest of the world as biological warfare. The Andean nations have since banned its use throughout the region. Use of biological agents to kill crops is potentially illegal under the Biological Weapons Convention.

I was reminded of the pleasures of running the world, and of the sloe-eyed women who gravitate toward the plantation owners, especially in the warmer climes where slinky silks frame the female form.  We uplifted those unlettered indians and mestizos in Honduras, so they could taste the joys of working on our team.

But the banana story is just too sad for words, and Hari's spin on it works for me.  I think the beginning of my political consciousness began even before my teens, upon hearing of marines in Central America.

That the peons who slaved for United Fruit came from cultures who had learned from their disastrous earlier versions of monoculture in the jungle, and would have honored banana (potato, chocolate...) crop diversity, makes it even more sad.

Maybe i should be commenting in anger, at the imbecility that rules our societies, because they have no relationship to the planetary ecosystem which supports their very existence.

(Though i'd like to know what bananas make up the organic banana crop that is being sold in every box store in Germany.)

Skennah Kowa

DJ Nozem: Europe: Against Stronger Monocultures

Or, why I despair at libertarianism, take 2287623.

From Marginal Revolution:

It turns out, by the way, that the world's supply of Cavendish bananas -- the ones we eat -- is endangered by disease (more here) and many experts believe the entire strain will vanish. Most other banana strains are much harder to cultivate and transport on a large scale, so enjoy your bananas while you can. The previous and supposedly tastier major strain of banana -- Gros Michel -- is already gone and had disappeared by the 1950s, again due to disease. Today, European opposition to GMO is one factor discouraging progress in developing a substitute and more robust banana crop.

Bad Europeans. Preventing progress towards a more successful monoculture because of their silly green ways.

Glyphosate/Fusarium Connection:

WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (IPS) - Scientists are expressing alarm after finding elevated amounts of potentially toxic fungal moulds in food crops sprayed with a common weed killer widely used with genetically engineered (GE) plants.

Roundup, produced by food-industry giant Monsanto, contains a chemical called glyphosate that researchers are blaming for increased amounts of fusarium head blight, a fungus of often very toxic moulds that occurs naturally in soils and occasionally invades crops, but is usually held in check by other microbes.

If true, the allegations could not only call into question the world's number one weed killer, but they also jeopardise global acceptance of Monsanto's flagship line of genetically engineered Roundup Ready crops.

Those crops are themselves unaffected by the Roundup weed killer, which kills all competing plants, such as weeds, in the same area.

Monsanto has been producing a series of GE Roundup Ready seed stock for various crops, including cotton, soybean, wheat and corn, to be used exclusively with their successful glyphosate weed killer Roundup. But because they are genetically engineered, the crops have not found easy acceptance in many countries outside the United States, and they are still banned in Canada and Europe.

A four-year study found that wheat treated with glyphosate appeared to have higher levels of fusarium than wheat fields where no glyphosate had been applied, said Myriam Fernandez of the Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre in Swift Current, in Canada's Saskatchewan province.

Google for "glyphosate fusarium" and you find a number of other links, including many hand-waving denials by various "Monsanto representatives".

Glyphosate and other powerful weedkillers are almost inevitable in monocrop agriculture because the monocrop is a wildly unbalanced system, incapable of self-regulation.  "Weeds" live fairly amicably alongside food crops useful to humans in diverse dense polyculture, but to "optimise" use of a huge land parcel by planting it exclusively in one cash crop requires draconian elimination of all "competitors" (and this again is a madness deriving from a neoDarwinist ideological mindset which believes only in competition, not in symbiosis).  Eliminating "weeds" also eliminates the cycle of succession planting and green manuring that keeps soil viable, and ... well, here we go.  

A biotic system is not a factory;  industrial agriculture tries to impose the factory template onto a biotic system;  the result is an ever-escalating round of bandaids to address a never-ending series of disasters.  Compared to the idiocy of plantation industrial ag, the old practise of killing the king every year and burying him in the corn field looks like rock-solid sanity.

Recommended reading:  Biomimicry by Benyus, especially Ch 2, "How Will We Feed Ourselves?" -- a good overview of the lunacy of monocrop agriculture and the robustness of dense polyculture.  Of particular interest is the Land Institute's experimentation with "edible prairie," a very promising form of permaculture.

Note again that fusarium is a naturally occuring fungus normally held in check (in balance, in other words) by other microbial populations.  Plantation ag specialises in destroying the microbial population of the soil, rendering it a sterile "growing medium" salted with artificial fertilisers.  What it does is essentially to kill off all the antibodies, white blood cells, etc. -- and then wring its hands and act shocked, shocked I tell you, when the patient's compromised immune system collapses.

The plantation monocrop model is inherently futile.  However, it is the most "efficient" way of stripmining soil resources and funneling profit into the hands of rentiers.  Capitalism requires the plantation monocrop model to ensure (temporarily, anyway) delusional rates of return on loans.  But the rate of return is contrabiotic, hence the agriculture method is contrabiotic, therefore doomed.  Finance capitalism has to give way to biotic reality, or experience a Jared Diamond Collapse due to its own pigheaded insistence on the primacy of imaginary money over real biology...  The banana is just one poster child for this process, there are plenty of others.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

:>


Facts, selfish little bastards. They don't even care about your feelings.

Yes, We Will Have No Bananas.