The Guardian brings us some good news. A small - and British, for what little that matters - company is getting somewhere with solving one of the world's problems. That specific thing we hope gets solved being bananas.

The world's commercial crop is, pretty much exclusively, one cultivar, the Cavendish. There are hundreds of others out there, but that just the one is the commercial industry. More than just a cultivar, they're all clones. Thus any disease that can affect the one plant (an herb apparently, not a tree) can and will affect all globally. As is currently happening.

We know roughly what to do about this as we've done it before, when the Cavendish replaced the earlier clone Gros Michel suffering the same problem.

So, a problem, someone's working to solve it, and ain't that great? At which point we are told:

However, they face competition from other research companies and academic institutions.

However's not the right word there. We face uncertainty - we simply do not know what is the right, in detail, response. Perhaps it is to move to another cultivar. Maybe it's GMO to make the Cavendish resistant. Maybe it's to abandon banana cultivation. Well?

Which is exactly why we use markets as our experimentation machine to find out. Lots of people try in lots of different ways and we use that calculator of the entire economy to work out which is the best answer.

The correct phrasing therefore is "Huzzah, they face competition from other research companies and academic institutions."