Bananas are in peril. May Spain’s Canary Islands save them?

Pushing again flaps of yellowing banana leaves, Moisés Pulido trudges by a layer of dusty soil protecting his plantation on the coast of La Palma. Beneath the blinding solar, batches of bananas are nearly seen below the treetops, nestled collectively in lime-green bunches.

In late 2021, when the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted on the western fringe of this island within the Atlantic Ocean, burying 300 hectares (about 740 acres) of banana timber in ash and destroying 200 extra, farmers like Mr. Pulido couldn’t think about the volcano was doing them any favors.

However the Cumbre Vieja eruption may really maintain a number of the solutions to protecting bananas viable sooner or later, not simply right here however elsewhere.

A fungus behind the situation often known as Fusarium wilt – or Panama illness – is threatening bananas world wide. Some say the fungus, which blocks the move of water and vitamins to the plant by its roots, may trigger the favored Cavendish banana to go extinct.

However not like in tropical areas corresponding to components of India and China, the place many of the world’s bananas are produced, the subtropical local weather of the Canary Islands – and La Palma’s western coast, specifically – has offered a path of resistance to the wilt.

Certainly, the volcanic ash that farmers as soon as lamented after Cumbre Vieja’s eruption incorporates important vitamins that defend the plant – and could possibly be a key to bananas’ survival.

“Tropical crops, corresponding to bananas, develop extra slowly and are much less productive [here] than in tropical locations,” says Antonio Marrero, affiliate professor of agricultural and environmental engineering on the College of La Laguna in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain. “However, in alternate, most of the ailments of tropical locations are absent within the Canary Islands.”