banana

New Guinea highlands; deliberate banana planting is evidenced at Kuk Swamp from roughly 6,950 to 6,550 years ago, which makes it one of the earliest independent domestications anywhere

Southeast Asia, Africa via Indian Ocean trade, Americas via Portuguese/Spanish colonization, United Fruit Company plantation economies

The term banana republic was coined by O. Henry in 1901, out of his time in Honduras, and it arrived before the coups it is now used to describe: United Fruit's land concessions and the overthrow of governments that threatened them came later. The company grew into the word. Modern monoculture then repeated the exposure. Panama disease took Gros Michel out of the export trade in the 1950s and the industry replaced it with a single clone, Cavendish, rather than with diversity. TR4, the strain Cavendish cannot resist, was isolated in Taiwan at the end of the 1980s. The industry did not create the fungus. It planted one genotype across the world and handed an ordinary soil pathogen an unbroken run, which is the same mistake it had already survived once.