The part that makes me laugh, is that creations often trot out the idea that the banana is such the perfect fruit, God had to have made it for our enjoyment. When in fact, it was humans that breed it.

Some of these seeds are so attractive to farmers that other, less productive but more robust strains are disappearing, leading to loss of genetic diversity. Its not inconceivable that some new disease of say wheat, or rice, could suddenly arise and wipe out the food source for millions of people, while alternate strains resistant to that pest may no longer be available.

Some government and UN agencies even maintain farms for growing and storing natural varieties of common crops so that if such a catastrophe does occur, we can fall back on less productive, but hardier grain stock. But these seeds are rapidly vanishing from the natural environment. And of course, funding these facilities is always low priority in today’s political and economic environment.

Its not exactly “planned extinctions”, but its pretty close.

BTW, have you noticed how odd bananas taste lately? It takes them forever to ripen, but when they finally do, they are only edible for a few days. And their peels come off differently than they used to.

How DO bananas reproduce, anyway? There are no seeds in the fruit. Maybe they have been bred into strains incapable of surviving without intense cultivation, like citrus, which can only reproduce by cuttings and grafts.

While apartheid still held sway in South Africa, the beleaguered white supremacist government came up with a diabolical scheme to cripple the hostile black nations that surrounded it, not to mention tailor-made for genocidal purposes within their own borders. Like all conspiracy theories, it starts off from a germ of reality. They had discovered a very virulent strain of virus in African primates, what we now call HIV, and with a litttle genetic tinkering, they designed the ultimate biological weapon. It was a virus that attacked the human immune system, so that the victim died of some other disease with easily recognizable symptoms, not the AIDS itself.

This served to cover their tracks, because it would appear that the neighboring black populations were dying of the multiple tropical plagues that are already common in Africa. To further cover their trail, the killer bug was designed so that it had an extremely long incubation period, years in fact, and it only affected a small percentage of the people exposed to it.

To the local health authorities, it would simply look like there were big jumps in deaths from cholera, yellow fever, malaria, dengue, and other diseases, some of them exotics, others common pathogens endemic in the Third World. It was also extremely difficult to detect, it was hard to devise a test for it because medical specialists would not be expecting anything other than the bug that was directly responsible for the deaths; which would mask the real cause.

The new bioweapon was further designed so that it would not be easily transmittable. It was not contagious, and because contact between whites and blacks was so controlled in South Africa, it was expected that there was little risk of it spreading to the white population. The idea was that so many healthy carriers would be around that it would be almost impossible to isolate and track down. It would be an invisible killer that waited years before it struck, disguised itself as something else, and would eventually spread throughout the entire black population.

South Africa was uniquely qualified to develop such a weapon. It was a technologically advanced society, and was a recognized world leader in immune system suppression, due to their pioneering work in organ transplants and control of tissue rejection. SA had the means, the motive and the opportunity.

Only one question remained. How to deploy the weapon? A microbe that was highly unlikely to infect a victim would be difficult to disperse, and a long incubation period meant it would difficult to conduct the epidemiological studies needed to test it. The virus was genetically modified so it could be transmitted only by injection, direct into the blood stream. You could give it to anyone, but they could not spread it to anyone else.

The plan was to insert the killer into bottles of vaccine for other diseases, meant to be delivered only to black populations, or even abroad by health agencies like the UN and World Health Organization. In this way, small batches of the sabotaged vaccine for some common disease (like measles) would start attacking its victims years later, and they would die of other diseases, long after it would be likely that records would give a clue as to the true source. It would be possible in this way to conduct the necessary epidemiological studies to fine tune the biological agent, and to refine its properties. It could easily be tested far away, in Central Africa where no one would suspect its true origin even if it was discovered. Who would make the connection that victims of a variety of common diseases had one thing in common, that years earlier they had a been innoculated against measles from a specific lot of vaccine delivered by a respected health agency?

The problem came when the virus, already modified to be easily engineered genetically, mutated on its own and developed a strain that was sexually transmitted, or easily carried by the dirty needles of drug users, or tregically, transmitted from mother to child at birth. It quickly escaped its ethnic laboratories, crossed into the white population, and soon spread world-wide. It was only the totally unexplainable appearance in American homosexuals, a small, easily identified and otherwise healthy population of homogeneous habits living in a geographically limited area, gave health researchers the experimental controls needed to isolate the cause.

Wouldn’t it be ironic that AIDS might have beome impossible to detect and control if it hadn’t been noticed in unexpectedly large numbers among American gay men? The entire world owes them an enormous debt.

I did do a little research on the epidemic while contemplating my novel, and I found that those were not its origins, which by the way, are still not fully clear. But I also stumbled onto small groups of anomalists who are convinced that it is a deliberate biological attack gone amok, although the villains vary, from the Apartheid South Africans, to the CIA, to evil megacorporations, you know, the usual suspects. Their websites are quite convincing, and usually dripping with all sorts of documentation, footnotes, scholarly references, and the usual dose of paranoia about shadowy groups of evil people toiling in the background to take over the world.