How I ended up viewing this video is a long story. You know how sometimes you think about one thing, that leads to another, and pretty soon you end up some place totally unexpected?
Anyway, bananas are sometimes an example held up as to why we need genetic engineering. Banana breeding is very difficult, and has been pursued by experts for many years. Habitats for wild bananas, and crucially the bat that was their primary pollinator, have mostly been destroyed by man. We also don’t have enough germplasm in store in genebanks. We are reaching the end of life of the ‘cavandish’ banana we all know because of disease pressure.
The solution we are all told is that we have to accept GM bananas.
Of course a major part of the problem is we insist on intensively cultivating monocultures of bananas in chemical intensive environments, causing many of the the disease problems.
Here’s a small group of people trying to find a new public domain solution, targeted towards small farmers.
