Read the following passage and answer the item that follows. Your answer to this item should be based on the passage only.

European traders in the late 15th century first carried the banana from Southeast Asia across the tropics, and by the mid-20th century a single variety, the Gros Michel, had become the near-universal export banana thanks to its size and shipping durability. Its very genetic uniformity would later be its undoing: in the 1950s, spores of the soil fungus Fusarium oxysporum began spreading across plantations, and within a decade the disease had wiped out the Gros Michel across most of Latin America, forcing the entire export industry to switch to a different, resistant variety.

Which one of the following statements best reflects the critical message of the passage given above?