Fertile Cavendish banana breakthrough raises hopes of saving the fruit from disease

Yelloway, a research collaboration between Chiquita and crop-improvement firm KeyGene, says it has developed a fully fertile Cavendish banana. Normally sterile, the Cavendish could now be cross-bred into new disease-resistant varieties. The advance matters as the TR4 strain of Panama disease has spread from south-east Asia to Australia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, threatening a crop grown at 139m tonnes a year.