[troutman]

Originally Posted by GGG

Seed banks are important to perserve the variety so when these types of diseases strike plants you have a full range of genetic material to fight it with.

From what I understood in the show, bananas are extra tricky. They are sterile - the Cavendish bananas are clones.

http://conservationmagazine.org/2008...terile-banana/

Pity the banana. Despite its unmistakably phallic appearance, it hasn’t had sex for thousands of years. The world’s most erotic fruit is a sterile, seedless mutant—and therein lies a problem. The banana is genetically old and decrepit. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since humans first propagated it in the jungles of Southeast Asia at the end of the last ice age. And that is why some scientists believe that the banana could be doomed. It lacks the genes to fight off the pests and diseases that are invading the banana plantations of Central America and the small holdings of Africa and Asia.

Normally, cultivated plants develop genetic variety through random mutations during sexual reproduction, just as humans do. This process means that different varieties develop resistance to various pests and diseases, and adaptability to stresses like droughts. Plant breeders tap into this genetic variety all the time. But without sexual reproduction to throw the genetic dice every generation, each variety of modern banana—yellow, red, and green, from big starchy ones to small sweet ones—has come down almost unchanged from a separate sterile forest mutant. Each is a virtual clone, almost devoid of genetic diversity. And that uniformity makes the banana ripe for disease like almost no other crop on Earth.