Abstract
What notions of health and proper nutrition are articulated in the use and promotion of agricultural biotechnology in the global South? What future trajectories for health do they envision? Experiments with genetically modified bananas in Uganda use the fruit as a vehicle to achieve public health goals. This work in plant science understands itself as humanitarian, drawing on specific notions of health and its opposite: the deficient health of humans and plants. Instead of thinking about improved health through bananas, which implies an instrumental relationship to plants, I connect this high-tech effort to a way of thinking with the banana plant in central Uganda that highlights the entanglement of human and plant growth. Expanding our thinking about health with plants and the gardens where they grow relocates the production of health to sites that still seldom figure in medical anthropology and helps reconceptualize what one takes growth to be and what relations can sustain cross-species thriving.
Highlights
What notions of health and proper nutrition are articulated in the use and promotion of agricultural biotechnology in the global South? What future trajectories for health do they envision? Experiments with genetically modified bananas in Uganda use the fruit as a vehicle to achieve public health goals
The fruit has been genetically modified and enriched nutritionally with beta-carotene, as part of a public health intervention against vitamin A deficiency in Uganda, and Dr Buah has been running lab analyses to identify which plants were expressing the highest levels of beta-carotene
James Dale, an internationally recognized expert on banana biotechnology, are doing cutting-edge research on the banana genome. They are editing the genome of banana plants at precise locations, using clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR), to investigate the function of specific genes
Summary
Sliced over cereal or chomped as a quick and healthy snack on the run, bananas are commonplace, even boring. Even in small-farming settings like Uganda, where many varieties of bananas are grown, a field will still contain many copies of the same plant, genetically identical suckers that are replanted. The banana rhizome doesn’t go through a seasonal cycle of death and rebirth; it produces fruit year-round, generates suckers that can be used for the expansion of the plantation, and potentially remains productive over generations. This plant’s biology offers a distinct way to think about growth, namely, as perpetually increasing and adding to what was before. Its growth overlaps with the telos of modernist thinking about steady and potentially limitless growth
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