A growing threat from extreme weather events and pathogenic diseases means businesses can no longer afford to take the availability of staple food crops for granted. By Nick Hughes.
The banana is in many ways the ultimate modern commodity crop. More than 1,500 varieties are known to exist but just one, the Cavendish, accounts for almost all of the bananas traded globally each year.
The Cavendish is prized by buyers and growers for its consistent taste, size and shape, and the rate at which it ripens; the thickness of its skin allows it to be transported between logistics hubs throughout the world without compromising on quality.
Yet the Cavendish has an Achilles Heel – it doesn’t have seeds and can only reproduce through cloning meaning it has no genetic diversity. As the journalist Dan Saladino explained in his 2023 book Eating to Extinction, this makes the Cavendish vulnerable to diseases wiping out entire crops, a risk that has manifested around the world where plantations are being killed off by pathogenic diseases like Tropical Race 4 (TR4), commonly known as Panama disease.
This fate has already befallen the forerunner to the Cavendish, the Gros Michel – the dominant variety of banana until the mid-20th Century when it was almost entirely wiped out by fungal disease.
If the banana is to continue to be a cheap dietary staple for consumers in the developed world there are effectively two options: to develop more resilient varieties of the Cavendish, or persuade people to eat a greater diversity of banana species. A third option is a combination of both.
Ripple effects
The crisis gripping the banana industry is replicated in many other global food and drink commodities – including those on which foodservice is heavily reliant. Ripple effects from the growing vulnerability of monoculture crops to climate change and other risk factors are being felt right along food supply chains.
This past year, cocoa and coffee have been hit particularly hard. A combination of higher-than-average rainfall and higher temperatures have led to coffee and cocoa prices surging 103% and 163% respectively in the last 12 months, according to analysis by Inverto.
The supply chain consultancy said it expects food prices to remain volatile throughout 2025 as the long-term trend towards more extreme weather events continues to hit regional crop yields. Businesses, it said, must adapt their strategies to minimise the impact of crop failures. This includes negotiating forward contracts with sellers and undertaking more contingency planning that will allow them to seamlessly swap one food commodity or source of supply for another.
For downstream businesses like restaurants and caterers, this kind of strategic, resilience-focused mindset doesn’t always come naturally. As Sarah Wakefield, executive director of the charity Eating Better, explained to me recently: in businesses where commercial and sustainability functions are not well-aligned “it is hard to make the case for investment [in supply chain security] until it is directly impacting your bottom line”.
Even if they don’t have their own ‘boots on the ground’ in vulnerable sourcing regions, consumer-facing businesses should at the very least be in constant dialogue with their suppliers over future vulnerabilities so that price spikes and stock shortages don’t catch them unawares.
Banana drama
For their part, the world’s biggest global suppliers are ramping up efforts to build a sustainable future for the commodities on which company fortunes have been made. Chiquita, one of the world’s biggest banana suppliers including to the UK foodservice sector, is working on a project with scientists at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands, along with research company KeyGene and startup MusaRadix, with the aim of producing bananas resistant to TR4 and Black Sigatoka, another pathogenic disease affecting banana crops. The goal is to produce banana varieties that resemble the Cavendish in taste, appearance and storage ability, while at the same time reducing carbon emissions associated with banana production. The so-called Yelloway initiative involves genome mapping, plant breeding, laboratory testing and field testing, with the first batch of bananas currently being deployed in the Philippines for field trials.
This kind of urgent research and development activity is being replicated across almost every commodity you can think of. Last year, Footprint reported on how the brewer Asahi UK is co-funding projects to explore sustainable innovations for British hop farming as climate change and the growing threat posed by pests and fungal disease (along with, it should be noted, changing consumer tastes) pose an existential threat to domestic growers.
Demand for cocoa alternatives is on the rise too with companies making strides in replicating the taste of chocolate using alternative ingredients and/or technologies such as precision fermentation. Last year, ingredients’ giant Cargill announced a partnership with supplier Voyage Foods to scale up alternatives to cocoa-based products “to meet consumers’ indulgence needs”. Voyage uses a blend of vegetable oils, grape seeds, sunflower protein flour and sunflower lecithin to produce a product similar in flavour to milk chocolate.
NGOs, meanwhile, are encouraging businesses to source a more diverse range of ingredients that can be substituted for staple commodity crops in food products and dishes. Back in 2019, WWF partnered with Unilever-owned Knorr to launch the Future 50 Foods report – a collection of diverse, healthy and sustainable plant-based foods from around the world. Fast forward to today and some of these foods, like the grains amaranth and buckwheat, and beans such as adzuki and black turtle, are starting to appear on UK menus as restaurants and caterers increasingly embrace plant-based cuisine.
Climate funding
Alongside business investment in climate resilient agriculture, western governments have historically funded research and innovation to help secure the future of key commodities as part of their spending on international development. Recent analysis from the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) found the UK has co-invested in at least 348 projects supporting overseas farmers struggling with climate extremes. Investments were made via multilateral climate funds, alongside other major economies like Germany and France, and spanned 111 countries, 84 of which grow food sold on UK supermarket shelves.
This includes support for banana farmers in Colombia via a project which enables more efficient water use and the cultivation of varieties more tolerant to climate impacts.
The UK has also supported Kenyan tea farmers via several projects, including one under the Green Climate Fund that is protecting crops through shading, wind-breaking, mulching and micro water harvesting.
Rice farmers in Pakistan have been supported through training in water management, intercropping, mulching, the cultivation of heat, drought and salt-tolerant crop varieties and integrated pest management.
Food security
This kind of support can’t all be attributed to moral virtue; governments have a vested interest in keeping domestic food prices low and availability high (which has become increasingly difficult, leading to growing concern over future food security). Half of the UK’s food supply chains originates in areas of particular climate vulnerability, according to the ECIU analysis, with around 16% of food imports coming from countries with the lowest resilience to climate change. These include many commodities that can’t currently be grown commercially at scale in the UK – staples like bananas, oranges, rice, tea, coffee and cocoa.
Concerns have been raised, however, that the recent decision of the Labour government to slash spending on international development from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3% in 2027 in order to fund an increase in defence spending risks undermining UK support for global action on climate change. “Cutting aid risks making the world more volatile and more dangerous, not safer,” said Green Party MP Ellie Chowns. “Real security means tackling hunger, poverty, and climate chaos.”
The likelihood is that businesses themselves will have to pick up the slack in funding climate resilience projects relating to food. Yet there are those who argue that tinkering around the edges of the current highly standardised, efficient model of global food supply will not serve us well in a future shaped by environmental and geopolitical instability. Writing in The Guardian in February, journalist and campaigner George Monbiot noted how: “As every enterprise seeks efficiencies, the system loses its redundancy. As trading rules and physical infrastructure are standardised (think of those identical container terminals, shipping and trucking networks), the system loses both modularity and backup strategies. When a system has lost its resilience, a small external shock can trigger cascading collapse.”
The history of banana production stands in testimony to Monbiot’s point. In an era of escalating and cascading climate risks, failing to invest in more resilient and, crucially, more diverse sources of supply would be, to use a colloquial expression…..bananas.
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