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Genetically Modified 'Super-Bananas' Are Being Tested in the US

A banana that's genetically modified to carry extra vitamin A aims to combat vitamin deficiency in Uganda. Will it take?
Matoke bananas. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Wikistallion

A genetically modified "super-banana" is going up for clinical market trials in the US. But the fruit was in fact engineered for Uganda, with the goal of getting Ugandans some extra vitamin A.

James Dale is the director of the Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Since 2005, Dale has been experimenting with pumping up the amount of vitamin A in the East African Highland cooking banana. He told Scientific American that “Roughly 15 to 30 percent of the Ugandan population under 5 and women of childbearing age suffer from a [vitamin A] deficiency.”

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The humble banana is actually sort of the perfect food to fortify with more vitamins: They already have some beta carotene, which is a nutrient that the body uses to produce vitamin A. Varieties of bananas that are native to Papua New Guinea have even more beta carotene, to the point of being both orange like carrots, and by all accounts unpleasant to eat.

But the good news was that Dale and his team only had to weave in genetic material from the beta-carotene rich Papua New Guinea bananas into their East African Highland cousin. "This gene we isolated and put in our super-bananas is a banana gene, and it always has been," Dale said. "We simply toned down its influence."

As Jennifer Huizen explains in her excellent Scientific American article, the other reason the East African Highlands banana is an ideal vitamin vessel is that Ugandans love them. “In fact, many receive 30 percent of their daily caloric intake from them,” Huizen wrote, “eating three to 11 bananas daily, or roughly 500 to 800 pounds annually.”

So: you have a country with a vitamin deficiency, and a silver bullet in the form of a GM banana that has 10 times the vitamin A potential of Bananas Classic. The only real problem is that GM foods can't legally be sold in Uganda. Ugandans remain leery of lab-altered food, just like pretty much everyone else.

The situation isn't too different from one in the Philippines, although there, the modified staple food was called “golden rice.” Though 4.4 million Filipino children were thought to be vitamin A deficient, according to the World Health Organization, the vitamin A-rich rice was delayed for 12 years by anti-GM-food anxiety.

And it doesn't even have to be the spectre of “genetic modification” that could sink the super-banana. Huizen mentions the fia banana as an example of what seemed to be the perfect fruit falling short of expectations. In the early 2000s, the fia banana, which has a “massive yield,” was transplanted to East Africa. The people didn't like the color or texture of the fia, and virutally no one is eating fia bananas in East Africa today.

The day of reckoning for the super-banana is still fairly far off, with scientific and legislative hurdles yet to overcome. Still, the GM banana has caught the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its considerable resources. It's going to take more than a sense of disquiet at the prospect of “GM fruit” to stop the super banana from at least having a shot.