Bananapocalypse?

On a mountainside plantation in Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines, neat rows of banana plants flourish. Their lush green leaves sway in the languid breeze. They are sometimes subject to fierce typhoon winds and other climate events, but global supply chains wait for no one: the farmers replow, reseed, and reharvest. 

Two thousand miles away, supermarkets in Tokyo overflow with stock. Workers constantly replenish fresh produce as it is sold, while touting novelty products like mochi donuts and fruit jelly drinks. On the shelves is a favorite item so common that it’s almost banal: the humble banana. 

What is the story of the banana in modern agriculture? How do tons of bananas make their way north, slowly working their way through global supply chains, and why does it matter? And are we on the precipice of a bananapocalypse? 

Enter environmental and economic anthropologist Alyssa Paredes, assistant professor of anthropology. She will take us on a journey: first underground, and then overseas.

Paredes works with banana farmers and other agricultural industry specialists in the Philippines to learn more about the anthropological effects of Fusarium wilt. Photo courtesy of Alyssa Paredes

Before we get into the bananapocalypse, we first need to understand Paredes. Raised in the Philippines, she traveled to Japan on a Fulbright fellowship to study ceramics after she completed her undergraduate degree. It was an experience that opened her eyes to the world of producers and manufacturers, an interest that would eventually lead her to the food and beverage industry.

She learned Japanese, then worked in a multinational beverage corporation that made and marketed teas sold in vending machines around Asia. While working at her job, she learned more and more about transnational supply chains. She wondered what the connections were between producers and consumers, who knew little about each other. So much of the business was built on assumptions: what the company thought consumers wanted, and how they could get it to them. 

For Paredes, these were the kinds of questions one could pursue as an anthropologist, and she began a Ph.D. program at Yale. There seemed to be so many factors at work that were opaque to both consumers and producers—they didn’t know where their food came from or where it was going. To find out more, Paredes divided her fieldwork between banana plantations in the Philippines and urban consumer cooperatives in Japan. 

While she was conducting her fieldwork, she learned that a nefarious force was at work on banana plantations.

HEALTHY AND INFECTED BANANA TREES: The illustration on the right depicts a healthy banana plant, while the one on the left is infected by the fungus. Often, infected plants struggle to bear fruit at all.

Industrial agriculture in Mindanao, the southernmost region of the Philippines, is all-consuming. Banana plantations blanket the hills, making use of all arable land and making the nation Asia’s leading banana producer. But in the past 20 years, the rolling sea of green has begun to develop sickly yellow patches that molder into brown, and is finally set ablaze by farmers to be left fallow for 30 years or more. 

It’s fusarium oxysporum f. sp. Cubense—FOC for short—at work. The virulent fungus causes a devastating disease called Fusarium Wilt Tropical Race 4, also known as TR4. Proliferated by industrial tools contaminated with pathogenic soil, TR4 is destroying livelihoods in Mindanao. 

“Fungi are microscopic entities,” Paredes says. “You can’t even see them. You can barely detect that they’re there. But they cause completely paradigm-shifting, existential threats to industrial agriculture.” 

Try as agriculturalists might, they have not been able to identify a solution. Nothing works. Bananas, which are often grown as an industrial monocrop, share the exact same genome as every other plant on the farm. Because TR4 affects more than 80 percent of the banana plant’s germplasm, the effects are devastating. The typical response of the industry is to blast the plantations with pesticides, and when that fails, they genetically modify the banana species to resist the pathogen. But none of these conventional methods have been viable for treating TR4. 

FOC has now traveled to other major banana-producing countries like Colombia in South America. The detection of FOC in a plantation’s soil is viewed as an “irreversible death sentence,” Paredes says. One of her interview subjects put it in powerful terms: “If you go around local banana farms, your heart will really bleed.” 

Part of the problem, Paredes says, is that industry fixes are both short-term and inadequate. Her research has found that Big Ag—shorthand for consolidated, industrialized, and multinational agricultural systems—essentially puts a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. The solutions they offer, she says, never address the root cause of the disease. A turning point—a bananapocalypse, to use a term now popular in industry and academic circles—is looming, and conventional scientific approaches so far have proved inadequate. But what if there were another way?

“There’s this prevailing belief in the scientific community that there is nothing that can be done,” says Paredes, third from right. Photo courtesy of Alyssa Paredes

While living on a banana plantation and learning from a local farmer, Paredes made the acquaintance of a gentleman named Dennis Bialen. He came from a rice farming family, where life was defined by hard manual labor and financial struggle. While Bialen obtained an undergraduate degree in agricultural sciences at a local university in Cotabato Province in the Philippines, he swiftly became disillusioned with industrial agriculture: industry-generated solutions failed while farmers suffered. 

When TR4 inevitably struck Mindanao, Bialen urged local farmers to adopt organic methods in order to combat the fungus. His efforts were to no avail. “I felt like I had failed,” he told Paredes in 2016. What gave him solace was his Christian faith. He fervently prayed for an answer that would “do good and not evil.” 

Something—or someone—answered. Between the years of 2008 and 2011, he had recurring dreams about how to concoct a liquid biological control, cultivated from organic matter he collected in the forest. The forest itself gave him the answer: “Nobody manages the forest or provides it with fertilizer, but it never gets sick. Why? The answer is simple: ecological balance,” Bialen told Paredes.

After weeks of camping in the forest, collecting organic specimens, and cultivating them in petri dishes at home, Bialen finally had a product. He called it Crop Vaccine; if humans could get vaccines to protect community health, he reasoned, so should plants. In the years before he and Paredes met, he began developing and disseminating prototypes to farmers, who prepared the solution using commonplace ingredients, and then administered it to their banana fields.

The outcome: Crop Vaccine worked.

Among the Filipino banana farmers Paredes interviewed, many had heard of Crop Vaccine and touted it as a miracle. But when Paredes spoke with industry executives and agricultural scientists, they all dismissed it—many with disdain, some with outright offense. One representative snapped at her, “If I told you that my grandmother’s urine cured diabetes, would you drink it?”

Paredes points out that she is an anthropologist, not a microbiologist or plant pathologist. “I’m interested in forms of knowledge that have been marginalized because they’re not recognized by institutional expertise,” she explains. Bialen’s Crop Vaccine is a case in point. Naysayers called him a pseudoscientist, a self-interested entrepreneur who was trying to trick undereducated people into buying his snake oil. They dismissed him partly because of his do-it-yourself methods, Paredes says, but also because of his ardent faith, which he referenced frequently.

But on the ground, it was Bialen’s belief in God that convinced local farmers that he was the real deal. “In the face of this death sentence of a disease, new actors emerge who represent a different kind of science,” Paredes says. This kind of science “is a lot more willing to entertain mysticism.” 

Because Big Ag had failed while Bialen succeeded, his experiments began to be recognized by others. By the time Paredes was finishing her fieldwork in the Philippines, Bialen had received an invitation to present at the 2017 World Banana Forum, sponsored by the United Nations.

In studying global supply chains, Paredes notes that the consumer at the end of the banana’s journey is generally unaware of what is happening on the other side. Bananas are so ubiquitous around the world that their presence may seem like a guarantee. 

Paredes doesn’t know whether the bananapocalypse can be prevented, especially by the industry. But she points out that, while nobody has found a large-scale solution, she has heard of individuals in addition to Bialen who are experimenting in the field—literally—to come up with a cure. These DIY scientists work in the Philippines, but potentially many more exist around the world.

The history of the fruit’s cultivation, she notes, also reflects other global historical events. Paredes sometimes refers to the Philippines as “Asia’s banana republic”—“through gritted teeth,” she says, laughing darkly. But the pejorative term is a historical reference that draws attention to past events that continue to have contemporary bearings. Massive conglomerations like the United Fruit Company transformed the landscape of Central American countries like Guatemala. They turned to the Philippines as terra nova when they realized they could diversify their landholdings there. 

While Crop Vaccine is still in use, it hasn’t been employed all over the Philippines or globally. Many banana consumers have never even heard of TR4 or FOC and the havoc they wreak on people’s lives half a world away. As an anthropologist, Paredes sees herself as a storyteller—a role that necessitates a turn toward the public eye in order to get the word out about what’s happening in the Philippines. She does so as an academic, and as a mixed-media anthropologist.

One example of her unconventional work is a collaboration with Filipinx-American artist Maia Cruz Palileo. In concert with Paredes’s research, Cruz Palileo created a work of two-dimensional art using paper made with abacá, a fiber derived from the banana plant, and pyrite, also known as fool’s gold. The piece, titled Fool’s Gold, is now on display at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.

“Industrial agriculture is dying of a disease of its own,” says Paredes. Photography by Leisa Thompson/Michigan Photography

“When I heard about Alyssa’s research, I was totally hooked,” Cruz Palileo reflects. “It was an opportunity to share what’s happening on these banana plantations and with the people who live there.” The work is a “kaleidoscopic” mix of “archival and spectral imagery,” symbolizing how FOC wipes out banana plantations and their caretakers—the pyrite gradually deteriorates the abacá just as TR4 withers banana plants and the livelihoods around them. While the artwork is on display, its form will shapeshift. It is just as dynamic as the phenomenon it represents. 

On campus at U-M, Paredes teaches courses about anthropological approaches to the environment and the economy. In the fall of 2025, she was the featured speaker in the Department of Anthropology’s Roy A. Rappaport Lecture Series. In her lectures, Paredes urges her students to broaden their intellectual horizons by interrogating what knowledge is considered illegitimate in global society, and why. 

Paredes often finds herself in the interstices of academic disciplines, international borders, and professional vocations. It’s in these dynamic spaces that she feels most needed. “I’ve played the role as a kind of mouthpiece,” she explains. “A translator between worlds.”

Evidence of Fusarium wilt is apparent when the fruit of an infected plant is cut open. Photography by Clare Thatcher

The FOC fungus is everywhere, not just in the Philippines, where Paredes does her research. Banana plantations in Central and South America have reported the presence of Fusarium wilt—a phenomenon whose impact has not yet reached supermarket shelves in the United States. Researchers around the world have proposed solutions like gene editing, which would make the Cavendish, the dominant commercial variety of bananas, TR4-resistant.

Meanwhile, some grassroots organizers urge against monocropping when there are hundreds of banana varieties, many of which naturally resist fungal infection. 

But because FOC can persist in the soil for decades, it’s unclear whether the Cavendish will survive and what that will mean in places like the United States, where bananas are the bestselling and most consumed fruit.

Learn more about the locations around the world where bananas are infected with Fusarium wilt, a lethal fungal disease.