美国国家公共电台 NPR Devastating Banana Fungus Arrives In Colombia, Threatening The Fruit's Future

 

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

If you like bananas, we've got some bad news. A fungus¹ that kills the ubiquitous fruit has appeared for the first time in Latin America, which is the source of most bananas sold in the U.S. This disease has caused huge problems in Asia, and there is no cure for it. NPR's Dan Charles has the story.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE²: This is what Fernando Garcia-Bastidas has been dreading³, hoping it wouldn't happen - and then, one day in June, it did.

FERNANDO GARCIA-BASTIDAS: For me, the worst moment was the first pictures, of course.

CHARLES: Some farmers in Colombia, where he grew up, sent him pictures of some of their banana plants. They wanted his opinion because Garcia-Bastidas is an expert on bananas. He works for the company Keygene in the Netherlands. In the photos, the plants were wilting⁴ as if they didn't have water. Their leaves were turning yellow. Garcia-Bastidas knew right away these were the symptoms of a fungus called Fusarium.

GARCIA-BASTIDAS: I felt this thing in my heart that it was like kind of praying for a false positive or something like that. It was terrible.

CHARLES: For the next month, he says, he couldn't sleep. He flew to Colombia, tested samples of the wilting plants and confirmed his fears. It was a deadly form of Fusarium fungus called Tropical Race 4, or TR4. TR4 began marching through the world's banana-growing countries in the 1990s - Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Australia, the Philippines. It showed up in Mozambique, in Africa, five years ago. And now, somehow, it's hopped⁵ across the ocean to Latin America.

GARCIA-BASTIDAS: It is very difficult to control the spreading of this disease.

CHARLES: If this fungus gets into a plantation⁶, does that mean that the plantation eventually is doomed⁷?

GARCIA-BASTIDAS: Yes.

CHARLES: The fungus lives in the soil. No one knows how to eradicate⁸ it or protect plants from it. Banana growers just try to keep it from spreading. In Colombia, they're now destroying hundreds of acres of banana plants, anything close to the infected ones. The problem is by the time symptoms show up, the fungus has already been there for a year. And all that time, people may have been walking across the ground, picking up bits of fungus on their shoes.

GARCIA-BASTIDAS: I hope I'm wrong, but most likely it spread already to other places.

CHARLES: The only good news, really, is that it's a slow-moving disaster. In the Philippines, for instance, the fungus has been destroying individual farms for a decade now, but the country is still a major banana producer. And in the meantime, scientists are searching for a new kind of banana that can survive TR4.

Researchers in Australia have created one with genetic⁹ engineering, but growing it commercially or selling it will take approval from governments. Others are looking for solutions in nature. When Fernando Garcia-Bastidas was in graduate school, he checked 300 different kinds of bananas to see if they could resist TR4.

GARCIA-BASTIDAS: And, unfortunately, 80% of the material that I tested was susceptible¹⁰ to TR4, but there is a little bit of hope with the other ones that were not susceptible.

CHARLES: These fungus-resistant plants are not about to replace the bananas in supermarkets. Most of them are cooking bananas or plantations¹¹ or wild bananas with tiny fruit that you can't eat. They're full of seeds. But the hope is scientists can take those plants and improve them - cross-pollinating, reshuffling the genes¹² to create new bananas that are still immune to TR4 but also delicious. Few people have ever tried this. Breeding bananas is very, very hard, but Garcia-Bastidas says it can be done.

Dan Charles, NPR News.

1 fungus   

n.真菌，真菌类植物

参考例句：

• Mushrooms are a type of fungus.蘑菇是一种真菌。
• This fungus can just be detected by the unaided eye.这种真菌只用肉眼就能检查出。

2 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

3 dreading   

v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• She was dreading having to broach the subject of money to her father. 她正在为不得不向父亲提出钱的事犯愁。
• This was the moment he had been dreading. 这是他一直最担心的时刻。

4 wilting   

萎蔫

参考例句：

• The spectators were wilting visibly in the hot sun. 看得出观众在炎热的阳光下快支撑不住了。
• The petunias were already wilting in the hot sun. 在烈日下矮牵牛花已经开始枯萎了。

5 hopped   

跳上[下]( hop的过去式和过去分词 )； 单足蹦跳； 齐足（或双足）跳行； 摘葎草花

参考例句：

• He hopped onto a car and wanted to drive to town. 他跳上汽车想开向市区。
• He hopped into a car and drove to town. 他跳进汽车，向市区开去。

6 plantation   

n.种植园，大农场

参考例句：

• His father-in-law is a plantation manager.他岳父是个种植园经营者。
• The plantation owner has possessed himself of a vast piece of land.这个种植园主把大片土地占为己有。

7 doomed   

命定的

参考例句：

• The court doomed the accused to a long term of imprisonment. 法庭判处被告长期监禁。
• A country ruled by an iron hand is doomed to suffer. 被铁腕人物统治的国家定会遭受不幸的。

8 eradicate   

v.根除，消灭，杜绝

参考例句：

• These insects are very difficult to eradicate.这些昆虫很难根除。
• They are already battling to eradicate illnesses such as malaria and tetanus.他们已经在努力消灭疟疾、破伤风等疾病。

9 genetic   

adj.遗传的，遗传学的

参考例句：

• It's very difficult to treat genetic diseases.遗传性疾病治疗起来很困难。
• Each daughter cell can receive a full complement of the genetic information.每个子细胞可以收到遗传信息的一个完全补偿物。

10 susceptible   

adj.过敏的，敏感的；易动感情的，易受感动的

参考例句：

• Children are more susceptible than adults.孩子比成人易受感动。
• We are all susceptible to advertising.我们都易受广告的影响。

11 plantations   

n.种植园，大农场( plantation的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Soon great plantations, supported by slave labor, made some families very wealthy. 不久之后出现了依靠奴隶劳动的大庄园，使一些家庭成了富豪。 来自英汉非文学 - 政府文件
• Winterborne's contract was completed, and the plantations were deserted. 维恩特波恩的合同完成后，那片林地变得荒废了。 来自辞典例句

12 genes   

n.基因( gene的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• You have good genes from your parents, so you should live a long time. 你从父母那儿获得优良的基因，所以能够活得很长。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Differences will help to reveal the functions of the genes. 它们间的差异将会帮助我们揭开基因多种功能。 来自英汉非文学 - 生命科学 - 生物技术的世纪