By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Can the absurd Matt McGrath get any more absurd?
Bananas are set to get more expensive as climate change hits a much-loved fruit, one of the world’s top experts from the industry tells BBC News.
Pascal Liu, senior economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, says climate impacts pose an “enormous threat” to supply, compounding the impacts of fast-spreading diseases.
The World Banana Forum meets in Rome on Tuesday to discuss the challenges.
Some UK shops recently experienced banana shortages due to sea storms.
The UK alone imports around 5 billion bananas ever year, with around 90% sold through the major supermarkets.
Last week saw shortages of bananas in several UK supermarkets, which retailers said were down to storms at sea, delaying supplies.
Most consumers won’t have noticed, according to Prof Dan Bebber from the University of Exeter, who has studied efforts to make bananas more sustainable.
“The supply chain fluctuates but the UK is actually quite good at buffering those types of effects,” he told BBC News.
“Mainly, because the ripening centres can accelerate or decelerate the rate at which they ripen the bananas when they arrive, which helps to buffer those types of fluctuations.”
But while banana supplies can cope with short-term weather events like this, experts are concerned about the growing threats from a warming world, and from the diseases that are spreading in its wake.
“I think climate change is really an enormous threat to the banana sector,” said Mr Liu of the World Banana Forum, a UN umbrella group that brings together industry stakeholders including retailers, producer countries, exporters and research institutions.
As well as severe weather impacting production, bananas are sensitive to temperature rises which could wipe out crops in some locations.
Perhaps the biggest immediate threat is the fact that rising temperatures are helping to spread disease.
The one causing the most worry is Fusarium Wilt TR4, a fungal infection, which has moved from Australia and Asia to Africa and now to South America.
Producers are also facing pressures from rising costs of fertilisers, energy and transport as well as problems in finding enough workers.
Taken together with the impacts of climate change on supply, prices in the UK and elsewhere are likely to go up – and stay up.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68534309
Since the absurd McGrath has invoked the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, maybe he should actually have quoted their own data, which shows banana production at an all time high in 2022. Output has actually doubled in the last twenty years, DESPITE global warming.
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Author: Paul Homewood
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