The messaging on the "save the bees" was really poor. The honeybees are fine, but the big concern is all the thousands of species of wild bees that are at risk.

But all of that attention on honey bees has, some ecologists argue, overshadowed their native counterparts: the wild bees. They’re an incredible bunch, found in all sorts of colors and sizes, and they’re important pollinators, too — better, by some measures, than honey bees. On the whole, native bees are also at a much greater risk of extinction, in part, because of the proliferation of European honey bees.

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/2023/1/19/23552518/honey-bees-native-bees-decline

The Cavendish banana would have never gone fully extinct, it would have just become too fragile to be commercially viable, as happened to the Gros Michel in the 1950s.

As for the Cavendish, Central America was able to greatly slow the advance of Panama Disease with fire. Lots and lots of fire. It's still taking down plantations and is still news when it crosses into another South American country.

But we have recently identified the specific gene in our cloned cultivars that makes them so vulnerable to Panama, so a cure may now be possible. But as it stands we're still, potentially, one failed quarantine in Asia away from needing to replace the Cavendish banana.

Thanks. That’s exactly the type of material I’m looking for.

The idea that a monoculture can easily fail due to disease is not a conspiracy, and has and will happen.