Scientists and Farmers Race to Save the World’s Banana Supply

Dr. Banana’s first love was coffee. For eight years, Fernando García-Bastidas bred beans in his native Colombia, trying to make a stronger, more flavorful brew. But gradually his passion grew for the banana, the fruit he’d seen daily growing up in Nariño, the region bordering Ecuador to the south and the Pacific to the west. He began doctoral studies at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, studying wild types and supermarket varieties, rare cultivars and crossbreeds—and how Mother Nature sometimes conspires to kill them. Over the years he amassed an Instagram following under the handle @drbananagarcia.

In July 2019, García-Bastidas received an SOS over WhatsApp from a plantation farmer in La Guajira, in northeast Colombia, one of the country’s main banana-growing regions. Healthy banana leaves are deeply verdurous; the ones in the pictures were more yellow than green, and their edges were marred by the charcoal color of singed paper. “The only thing I was thinking,” he remembers, “is ‘I hope not, I hope not, I hope not.’ ”