Bananageddon: Millions face hunger as deadly fungus Panama disease decimates global banana crop | The Independent Bananageddon: Millions face hunger as deadly fungus Panama disease decimates global banana crop Disease spreads from Asia to Africa and may already have jumped to crucial plantations in Latin America Friday 4 April 2014 17:11 BST Click to follow Indy Politics The spread of the TR4 fungus represents an expanded threat to global banana production Getty Images Scientists have warned that the world’s banana crop, worth £26 billion and a crucial part of the diet of more than 400 million people, is facing “disaster” from virulent diseases immune to pesticides or other forms of control. Alarm at the most potent threat – a fungus known as Panama disease tropical race 4 (TR4) – has risen dramatically after it was announced in recent weeks that it has jumped from South-east Asia, where it has already devastated export crops, to Mozambique and Jordan. A United Nations agency told The Independent that the spread of TR4 represents an “expanded threat to global banana production”.

Experts said there is a risk that the fungus, for which there is currently no effective treatment, has also already made the leap to the world’s most important banana growing areas in Latin America, where the disease threatens to destroy vast plantations of the Cavendish variety. The variety accounts for 95 per cent of the bananas shipped to export markets including the United Kingdom, in a trade worth £5.4bn. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will warn in the coming days that the presence of TR4 in the Middle East and Africa means “virtually all export banana plantations” are vulnerable unless its spread can be stopped and new resistant strains developed. In a briefing document obtained by The Independent, the FAO warns: “In view of the challenges associated with control of the disease and the risk posed to the global banana supply, it is evident that a concerted effort is required from industry, research institutions, government and international organisations to prevent spread of the disease.” A aircraft sprays fungicide over a plantation (Getty Images) Scientists are particularly concerned about the impact of TR4 across the developing world, where an estimated 410 million people rely on the fruit for up to a third of their daily calories.

According to one estimate, TR4 could destroy up to 85 per cent of the world’s banana crop by volume. Since it emerged in the 1950s as the replacement for another banana variety ravaged by an earlier form of Panama disease, Cavendish has helped make bananas the most valuable fruit crop in the world, dominated by large multinational growing companies such as Fyffes, Chiquita and Dole. But the crop – and many other banana varieties – have no defence against TR4, which can live for 30 years or more in the soil and reduces the core of the banana plant to a blackened mush. It can wipe out plantations within two or three years and despite measures to try to prevent its spread from the original outbreak in Indonesia, it is now on the move. Such is the virulence of soil-based fungus, it can be spread in water droplets or tiny amounts of earth on machinery or shoes. Professor Rony Swennen, a leading banana expert based at Leuven University in Belgium, said: “If [TR4] is in Latin America, it is going to be a disaster, whatever the multinationals do. Teams of workers move across different countries.

The risk is it is going to spread like a bush fire.” Another senior scientist, who asked not to be named because of his links with the banana industry, said: “There are good grounds for believing that TR4 is already in Latin America.” Professor Rony Swennen, leading banana expert based at the University of Leuven The Panama fungus is just one of several diseases which also threaten banana production, in particular among smallholders and subsistence farmers. Black sigatoka, another fungus to have spread from Asia, has decimated production in parts of the Caribbean since it arrived in the 1990s, reducing exports by 90 to 100 per cent in five countries.

Read more Wheat rust: The fungal disease that threatens to destroy the world crop | The Independent Home News Wheat rust: The fungal disease that threatens to destroy the world crop Experts in Europe and Africa are racing to develop resistant grain varieties as university researchers predict the likely spread across continents of the air-borne spores of the fungus Saturday 19 April 2014 23:01 BST Click to follow The Independent Online The plant disease threatens the world's crops Scientists are warning that wheat is facing a serious threat from a fungal disease that could wipe out the world’s crop if not quickly contained. Wheat rust, a devastating disease known as the “polio of agriculture”, has spread from Africa to South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe, with calamitous losses for the world’s second most important grain crop, after rice. There is mounting concern at the dangers posed to global food security. Experts have been aware of the threat since a major epidemic swept across North America’s wheat belt in the 1950s, destroying up to 40 per cent of the crop. Since then, tens of millions of pounds have been invested in developing rust-resistant varieties of the grain.

However, an outbreak in Uganda in 1999 was discovered to have been caused by a virulent mutation of the fungus. There has been alarm at the speed at which further mutations have subsequently developed and spread across continents. Plant scientists in Britain estimate the latest developments mean that 90 per cent of all current African wheat varieties are now vulnerable to the disease. Last year, Germany witnessed its first outbreak of stem rust in more than 50 years. The outbreak was spurred by “a period of unusually high temperatures and an unusually late development of the wheat crop due to cold spring and early summer temperatures”, explained Kerstin Flath, of Germany’s Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants. A further outbreak occurred in Ethiopia last November, with farmers losing on average 50 per cent of their wheat crop; the worst affected lost up to 70 per cent. Experts met in Mexico last month to discuss the threat. Work is under way to examine the different strains, to identify similarities. According to Dr David Hodson, of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Addis Ababa, the disease’s threat lies in its ability to cause “large- scale destruction in a very short period of time over very large cultivated areas”.

Rust epidemics could be compared to a forest fire, Dr Hodson said. Once it manages to gain ground it can very quickly spread out of control. The fungus reproduces millions of wind-borne spores, each of which is capable of starting a new infection. Fazil Dusunceli, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that the fungal disease, along with drought, are major challenges to wheat production globally. He warned that countries need to react quickly to counter the new fungal varieties: “Production of new seed varieties is critical.” He said the UN was looking to countries such as the US, Britain and other European nations to lead the fight. “Developed countries have well-established institutions, programmes and capacities that developing countries lack. The developing countries are not sufficiently prepared to fight against these diseases and so when epidemics occur they encounter significant losses,” he said. British scientists from the Sainsbury Laboratory, together with those from the world-renowned John Innes centre, both in Norwich are in the vanguard of efforts to combat the outbreaks. The UK teams are trying to control the disease with genetics rather than develop more powerful chemical fungicides.

The work currently includes cloning new sources of resistance from wild grasses and from barley, which they think is essentially completely resistant to wheat rust. Academics at Cambridge University, led by Professor Christopher Gilligan, are using sophisticated mathematical models to help predict the likely spread from outbreaks. “The project is designed to develop and test mathematical models that can be used to improve understanding of when, where and how disease spreads, which regions are most at risk and how to control epidemics,” Professor Gilligan said. Using models from the UK Meterological Office, the Cambridge team were able to predict the likely spread of the Ethiopian outbreak. “The results helped to direct sampling teams to find further outbreaks, from which it became apparent the epidemic was more severe and widespread than had been previously reported.” Further work by the modellers has identified which of the countries surrounding Ethiopia in Africa, and the Middle East, are most at risk. “The current evidence suggests that the risk of direct spread to the Indian subcontinent is small during the winter months,” Professor Gilligan said. “The models show, however, that the fungus could spread in stages, by first infecting wheat crops in the Middle East and then spreading to other major wheat-growing areas.” According to scientists, climate change is in part behind the threat.

The aggressive spread of two forms of the fungus is widely believed to be linked to its rapid adaptation to warmer conditions. Dr Hodson said this is resulting in outbreaks in countries not previously affected, with epidemics in several countries from North Africa to South Asia. “The result has been large-scale epidemics in many parts of the world and stripe rust appearing in areas that were not considered favourable environments for the disease. Conditions this year were extremely favourable for rust development. In Ethiopia more than 600,000 hectares of wheat were affected – about one-third of the total area under wheat cultivation. Farmers suffered considerable production losses. “Precise effects are difficult to ascertain. Certainly climate change is having an influence, and will have an influence on pests and diseases in terms of shifts in distribution patterns and shifts in the timing of their appearance.” Pests and diseases are a major threat to agriculture around the world, producing blights that cost farmers millions in lost production. Black stem rust (Puccinia graminis) on bearded (awned) wheat stems Signs of blight Wheat rusts (yellow, leaf and stem rust) are fungal diseases that affect wheat in almost every country in which it grows, as infectious spores are transmitted by wind and through soil.

Seven to 15 days after infection, small red dots called uredinia begin to form on the leaf or stem surface. The stem rust fungus, Puccinia graminis, attaches to another organism to survive, killing the host in the process. Phytophthora infestans on potato Kill list Pests and diseases are a major threat to agriculture around the world, producing blights that cost farmers millions in lost production. Asian soybean rust affects the soya crop in Brazil – the world’s biggest producer. There are more than 244 confirmed cases this year. Industry spending on insecticides and fungicides is expected to reach $11bn (£6.6bn). Cocoa pod borer disease Cocoa bean production in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest producer, is likely to dip 2 per cent to 410,000 tonnes for 2013-2014, according to the International Cocoa Organisation. The fall is in part due to a tiny, mosquito-sized moth which attacks the plant. Potato blight is a fungus-like organism (above) that thrives in damp, humid conditions.

The speed with which blight infection occurs and the devastating impact on the crop make it the biggest threat to the six million tonnes of potatoes produced in the UK each year. Coffee leaf rust is an orange-coloured fungus that has swept through coffee fields from Mexico to Panama. The epidemic is affecting the livelihoods of more than two million people and causing the loss of 500,000 jobs. Banana fungus (TR4) This soil-borne disease is threatening banana crops in North America, Europe, South-east Asia, the Middle East and Africa; the value of traded bananas worldwide totals $8.9bn. Rozina Sabur Panama Disease The serious threats facing the world’s favourite fruit Learn how we can save the banana... And why that is so important. When was the last time you ate a banana? Have you ever considered what it might be like if the famous musical hit 'Yes, we have no bananas' was to become a reality? Such a scenario is not as unlikely as it may seem as the future of the world’s favourite fruit is under serious threat. And not for the first time...

In the first half of the 20th century, our parents and grandparents ate a delicious banana called Gros Michel, or Big Mike in colloquial terms. But in the 1950s a deadly strain of Panama disease wiped out almost all banana plantations in Central and South America. Despite the best efforts of growers, this most flavourful of fruits became virtually extinct. In the second half of the 1900s banana producers across the world switched to a different cultivar, the so-called the Cavendish. Although less tasty than Gros Michel, Cavendish was resistant to the type of Fusarium that was causing Panama disease. As a result, following enormous investments in infrastructural changes required to accommodate the Cavendish’s different growing and ripening needs, the banana industry was saved. But not for ever… in the 1990s a new strain of the Fusarium fungus appeared and began to spread. Originating in Taiwan, it soon reached other South East Asian countries such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines – and even northern Australia. Thousands of hectares of Cavendish have already been destroyed and many will follow if we are unable to stop Panama disease.

Bananas The worlds most favourite fruit crop Panama disease is not only a huge concern for the global export banana sector. It exerts an even greater impact on the domestic production of this staple crop as many locally preferred cultivars are also endangered, threatening the livelihoods of millions of smallholder producers. Some banana facts: More than 100 billion bananas are consumed annually in the world, making it the fourth most important food crop after wheat, rice and corn. 85% of the world’s banana production is used for local consumption, and only 15% is exported (mainly to the USA and Europe). Americans eat more bananas than any other fruit, with an average consumption of 11.9 kg per year, more bananas than apples and oranges combined. The threat The potential consequences of Panama disease Nearly all commercial banana plants are clones. This makes the global banana cultivation extremely prone to disease epidemics – if one banana plant gets sick, other nearby plants can easily get contaminated. The economic damage of the first Panama epidemic in the 1950s was staggering (at least US $2.3 billion). The banana catastrophe wiped out the Gros Michel plantations and had devastating consequences for the livelihoods of millions of banana workers and producers.

In 1992, a new strain of the Panama disease fungus was discovered in Southeast Asia. Since then, ten thousands of hectares of Cavendish plantations have been wiped out in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The damage caused by this second outbreak has already surpassed the US $400 million mark. How can we save the banana? Possibilities and research The problems related to Panama disease are complicated: Biology Quite simply, despite the world’s best efforts and major investments, scientists still don’t know enough about the biology and genetics of the causative fungus; and the other challenge is the need for greater genetic diversity among banana cultivars. Environment Thus, first and foremost, disease resistance is the best basis for a healthy banana. As long as we keep growing susceptible cultivars, this is labour lost in terms of disease control. Human factor Panama disease acts on different scales: Plant, field, farm, region, country and even continent. State-level & international cooperation and integrated research are indispensable to finding solutions in all of these domains and scales. This requires multilevel solutions, as well as concerted action on the part of all stakeholders as both smallholders and plantation owners suffer from the same problems.

Research Researchers, commercial companies and government institutions are working together on crop protection, food security and innovation. This will help to manage the dissemination of the deadly Fusarium fungus and sustain the livelihoods of the millions of people who depend on the banana. How you can support the banana? Show your support & spread the message The world’s most favourite fruit crop needs friends. Anyone who has something with bananas: let the world know the banana needs help. Whether you are producing, selling, exporting, researching or just eating bananas, let the world know the banana needs help to survive. Help the banana by becoming a Banana Friend Forever (BFF) and sharing with the world your concerns about the future of bananas. P.O. Box 69 T. +31 317 48 06 32 @. info@panamadisease.org How the Panama Disease can destroy Caribbean Banana Farming by 2020 | Lindsworth Deer’s MICO Wars: The Teacher Force Awakens Lindsworth Deer’s MICO Wars: The Teacher Force Awakens My blog is products, How to articles and marketing for various products.

Call me at 810-3537 to negotiate a package Menu ~ lindsworthdeer “This is not a threat only that Saint Lucia is concerned about, so therefore at the regional level, the governments, through the ministries of agriculture, are discussing, first of all to see how best we keep this disease out of our islands” Minister of Agriculture, Moses Jn Baptiste commenting on spread of deadly Panama disease Bananas are in trouble yet again. This time it’s the deadly (The Jamaica Observer, 2015, December 17) , Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum) which the UNFAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) says can wipe out Bananas in the Caribbean. In fact, this may be the biggest single threat to the Banana industry since the Black Sigatoka disease in 1991. Banana is the 8th most important food crop in the world. It is also the 4th most important food crop among the world’s least-developed countries. This includes such small Caribbean nations like Jamaica and St. Lucia in the Caribbean where farmers make a living from growing bananas.

In the years before the 1950, the Gros Michel which means “Big Mike”, was the most common variety of banana. The most flavourful of banana fruits was then wiped out by the Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum) in South and Central America. The banana producers then introduced the less tasty but Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum) resistant Cavendish variety in the 1900s, which we are eating to this very day. They basically saved the Banana Industry using this hardier variety, making changes to accommodate the Cavendish’s different growing and ripening cycle. But by the 1990’s, a new strain of the Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum) came along and began to kill off the Cavendish banana strain, all of which are genetic clones. The new disease seems to have originated from Taiwan and quickly spread around the world to places that grow bananas such as: China Philippines Australia. The Cavendish variety is slowly succumbing to the Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum). If a treatment isn’t developed soon, the Cavendish Banana may become extinct.

Panama Disease – Banana extinction by 2020 in the Caribbean The Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum) caused by a fungus and is soil-borne. Because of its hardy nature, spores can remain viable for decades. If your banana patch becomes infected Panama disease, you’ll probably have to abandon that field; there are no practices or fungicide that can cure a banana plan of this infection. In effect, you’ll have to quarantine your field and prevent people from walking through the field, as soil contaminants on their shoes carrying the spores of the Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum) fungus, which can be spread to other fields and banana plants this way. Hopefully the islands in the Caribbean can work together to face this common threat, as the Panama Disease (Fusarium Oxysporum) fungus threatens to wipe out the Banana Industry as we know it by the year 2020. References: Virulent fungal Panama Disease threatens to wipe out crops worldwide | Daily Mail Online comments A deadly plant disease is threatening to wipe out bananas. Scientists are desperately trying to find a remedy for Panama Disease before bananas as we know them become extinct.

And studies of a new virulent strain of the disease - Tropical Race 4 - suggest there may not be a cure. A new strain of Panama Disease is threatening to wipe out the popular Cavendish banana Panama Disease devastated banana crops in South-east Asia in the 1950s, wiping out the world's most popular banana, the Gros Michel. Now there are fears that the new strain will destroy Cavendish bananas, which accounts for 47% of bananas across the globe, reported The Daily Express About five billion bananas are eaten every year in the UK., Panama Disease has spread to parts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia and Central America and there are fears it could strike South America, where the majority of exported bananas are grown. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Dr Gert Kema, expert in global plant production at the Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said: 'Cavendish is now collapsing and there is nothing to replace it. On top of that many local cultivars - or varieties - are equally susceptible.' One expert's proposed solution to the disease is to create a new variety of banana that would be resistant to it.

Professor Altus Viljoen also said that stopping bananas from being exported from affected countries could be another way of helping to curb the spread of disease. Cavendish bananas are named for the family of the house they were first grown in - Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. Cavendish bananas were created at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire in the 1830s Alistair Smith, international co-ordinator for Norwich-based Banana Link, a co-operative that works with growers and farmers around the world, said the disease needed to be urgently contained. ‘It is more or less possible to contain with very strict measures but there is nothing to say [Panama disease] is not going to arrive somewhere else, for example from contaminated soil on boots or via an infected plant. ‘There is no way to salvage your production once you have got the disease. ‘It’s a huge issue for growers who have already been affected in places like the Philippines but awareness is only now growing in the Americas who are yet to be hit.

‘The potential for devastation if it does reach them is almost total.’ A horrifying disease is threatening to destroy the world’s bananas - Salon.com Tuesday, Apr 15, 2014 4:24 PM UTC A horrifying disease is threatening to destroy the world’s bananas The U.N. is warning of the "massive destruction" of the world's banana crop (Credit: aodaodaodaod/Shutterstock ) A rampant banana disease — the one that Chiquita doesn’t want you to worry about , also known as the “HIV of banana plantations” — threatens the world’s banana crop, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned Monday. And it’s spreading.

Fusarium wilt TR, or Panama disease, takes ordinary yellow bananas and does this to them: Experiments in the greenhouse showed @Ferchucky yesterday what happens with roots when Cavendish meets Foc TR4 pic.twitter.com/Fii2cRrYDH — Banana Research (@bananaresearch) March 21, 2013 The fungal disease recently spread from Asia, where it’s already caused significant losses, to Africa and the Middle East, and the FAO believes Latin America could be next. That would ramp the crisis up considerably: About 70 percent of the world’s banana exports are grown in the region. And it would do more than remove the fruit from grocery store shelves: Bananas are a key source of food in many tropical countries. “The spread of Fusarium wilt could have a significant impact on growers, traders and families who depend on the banana industry,” FAO plant pathologist Fazil Dusunceli said in statement . “Countries need to act now if we are to avoid the worst-case scenario, which is massive destruction of much of the world’s banana crop.” Like so many diseases, the best way to address it is to prevent its spread.

To that end, the FAO is calling for “a concerted effort … from stakeholders including the industry, research institutions, governments and international organizations” to monitor and contain it. Lindsay Abrams is a staff writer at Salon, reporting on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com. How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit — Quartz How we eat March 03, 2014 During harvest last year, banana farmers in Jordan and Mozambique made a chilling discovery. Their plants were no longer bearing the soft, creamy fruits they’d been growing for decades. When they cut open the roots of their banana plants, they saw something that looked like this : A banana plant ravaged by Tropical Race 4. (Twitter user @bananaresearch) Scientists first discovered the fungus that is turning banana plants into this rotting, fibrous mass in Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Since then the pathogen, known as the Tropical Race 4 strain of Panama disease, has slowly but steadily ravaged export crops throughout Asia. The fact that this vicious soil-borne fungus has now made the leap to Mozambique and Jordan is frightening.

One reason is that it’s getting closer to Latin America, where at least 70% of the world’s $8.9-billion-a-year worth of exported bananas is grown. Randy Ploetz, professor of plant pathology at University of Florida who discovered Tropical Race 4, says it may already be in Latin America. “The story on the Mozambique situation was that workers brought over to establish the plantations—some of them were from Latin America,” he says. “And this is an insidious disease in that it can move… by soil-contaminated machinery, tools—that kind of thing.” Chiquita, the $548-million fruit giant with the world’s largest banana market share, is downplaying the risk. “It’s certainly not an immediate threat to banana production in Latin America [where Chiquita’s crops are],” Ed Lloyd, spokesman for Chiquita, told the Charlotte Business Journal in late December, explaining that the company is using a “risk-mitigation program” to approach the potential spread. Even if it takes longer to arrive, the broader ravaging of the commercial banana appears inevitable. And we don’t need to imagine what that would mean for banana exports—the exact scenario has already happened.

Starting in 1903, Race 1, an earlier variant of today’s pathogen, ravaged the export plantations of Latin America and the Caribbean. Within 50 years, Race 1 drove the world’s only export banana species, the Gros Michel, to virtual extinction . That’s why 99% of the bananas eaten in the developed world today are a cultivar called the Cavendish, the only export-suitable banana that could take on Race 1 and live to tell. Over the half-century it took to wipe out the Gros Michel, Race 1 caused at least $2.3 billion in damage (around $18.2 billion in today’s terms.) And that was in the commercial heart of global banana production. Tropical Race 4, by comparison, has damaged $400 million in banana crops in the Philippines alone. But the bigger difference now is that, compared its 20th-century cousin, Tropical Race 4 is a pure killing machine—and not just for Cavendishes. Scores of other species that are immune to Race 1 have no defenses against the new pathogen.

In fact, Tropical Race 4 is capable of killing at least 80%—though possibly as much as 85%—of the 145 million tonnes (160 million tons) of bananas and plantains produced each year, says Ploetz. ​ And at $8.9 billion, bananas grown for export are only a fraction of the $44.1 billion in annual banana and plantain production—in fact, bananas are the fourth-most valuable global crop after rice, wheat, and milk. Where are the rest of those bananas sold? Nearly nine-tenths of the world’s bananas are eaten in poor countries, where at least 400 million people rely on them for 15-27% of their daily calories. And that’s the really scary part. Since the first Panama disease outbreak, bananas have evolved from snacks into vital sustenance. And this time there’s no back-up banana variety to feed the world with instead. Tropical Race 4’s global reach. Note that while Race 1 is in many more places, far fewer banana varieties are susceptible. (Banana Research) Meet the Cavendish: the world’s multi-billion-dollar banana Quick—think of a banana.

Chances are good that, you’re imagining something closer to what’s on the right, and not the left: On the left, Musa velutina, on the right the Cavendish. (Left image by Flickr user Wendy Cutler; right image by 24oranges.nl.) That iconic yellow one is a Cavendish. Americans love it so much that they buy more bananas than apples and oranges combined. It might be the most famous, but Cavendishes make up less than half of the bananas grown around the world. The fuzzy, stubby pink bunch on the left— a Musa velutina —is an example of the incredibly diverse range of banana species that grow around the world. Native to Assam, India , Musa velutinas are much softer and sweeter than Cavendishes. So why don’t we see Musa velutinas—or other species—in developed world supermarkets? Quality control is one; since they reproduce, the Musa velutinas vary in size and shape. Plus, the pink fruit’s hard seeds can nick a filling. And they’re not as “productive” as Cavendishes—meaning, they produce less volume of fruit per plant.

Cavendishes also take a long time to ripen and have tough exteriors, which allow them to travel far without going bad or getting banged up along the way. These Philippines bananas don’t look much like the Cavendish. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila) In the same way that the Cavendish gets all the fame, brand names like Chiquita and Dole dominate the popular conception of the banana market. But exports make up only 15% of global output; the rest is consumed by banana-producing nations or sold unofficially in regional markets. In fact, the top two banana and plantain producers—India and China—don’t export at all, though they produce a combined 35% of the global yield. The developed world prizes bananas as a food of convenience—it’s cheap, portable and reasonably healthy. In poor countries, however, bananas are often a basic source of nourishment for at least 400 million people.

The average person in Uganda, Gabon, Ghana and Rwanda relies on bananas and plantains for more than 300 calories each day—around 16% of the UN’s nourishment threshold (and bear in mind that around 20% of the 74 million people living in those four countries are undernourished). Roughly 70% of all bananas consumed locally are vulnerable to Tropical Race 4. And while millions of farmers feed their families with home-grown bananas, many millions more use income from growing them to buy other crops. Bananas are the most important export commodity for Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Belize. They’re in the top three in Colombia, the Philippines, Guatemala, Honduras, and Cameroon. That’s a lot of the developing-world economy reliant on a very vulnerable crop.

“This disease is a problem, not only because of its potential impact on the price and availability of our favorite fruit, but also because it’s a life-changing event for the people in developing countries who rely on bananas as a staple food and incomes,” Alice Churchill, a scientist studying plant biology at Cornell University, told the Cornell Sun , “Those affected by [Panama disease] lose both their livelihoods and an important source of nutrition.” ​ The deadliest disease the banana world’s ever seen Panama disease is so virulent that some call it the “ HIV of banana plantations ” (paywall). Here’s why it’s so lethal: It strikes from inside the plant. The yellowing leaves are often the first thing farmers notice. That happens because Tropical Race 4 creeps into a banana plant’s roots, spreading up its vascular system and strangling the supply of water and nutrients. As the banana plant’s leaves wilt, it becomes harder and harder to conduct photosynthesis, leaving its fruits stunted. Eventually the plant simply dies. Nothing can kill it. There are other big, bad banana-killers out there.

Some, like Black Sigatoka and burrowing nematode worms , sound as nasty as they are (some, like a nefarious Asian virus called Bunchy Top , don’t.) But spray all of those with enough chemicals and they back off. Not so with Panama disease. Once a plantation has it, nothing gets rid of it. It’s stealthy. The thing clings to shoes, equipment, luggage, or whatever else touches contaminated dirt, making it incredibly contagious. All it takes is one clump of soil to spread Tropical Race 4. It plays a long game. Dead plants leave behind spores, allowing the fungus to lie dormant in the ground for decades in wait for new crops to blight. It’s confusing. The one proven prophylactic is rigorous quarantine, which Australia has implemented to good effect. A big worry with Latin America at the moment is that, because Tropical Race 4 causes symptoms that look like the old kinds of Panama disease—Race 1 and 2, which are still present in Latin America—farmers might not realize their crops are infected until it’s too late to quarantine, says University of Florida’s Ploetz. And Tropical Race 4 is way deadlier than Race 1.

When Race 1 wiped out the Gros Michel, the volume of other banana species also susceptible was small. How things have changed. As much as 85% of global banana output is vulnerable to Tropical Race 4. ​Tropical Race 4’s route to domination. ("Fusarium Wilt of Bananas (Panama Disease)," A. Daly in Agnote) Before the Cavendish, there was Big Mike The knitting of our fate with that of Tropical Race 4 began more than a century ago, with a banana far tastier than any most Quartz readers have ever had. While its famously creamy flavor made the Gros Michel—or “Big Mike”—a big hit around the Caribbean among small-time farmers, its tough, thick skin and its high yield are what landed this cultivar in cereal bowls and lunch bags far beyond the tropics. Like all domesticated bananas, the vast majority of Gros Michel didn’t carry seeds. So how did they reproduce? You simply would cut off a chunk of a banana tree, plant it, and wait for your banana tree to sprout. In other words, the bananas eaten commercially are all clones.

Those qualities also gave rise of the industrialization of banana-growing, as they allowed scrappy American entrepreneurs to construct banana empires throughout Latin American rainforests, often building railroads to ports in exchange for long-term land rights. These banana barons pioneered the industrial agriculture model familiar today, maximizing land, minimizing labor, and vertically integrating in order to send their product far and wide. The docks of the United Fruit company in Honduras, 1954. (AP Photo) That let them sell Big Mikes for cheap—an important development given that in 1899, the fruit was still found mainly in posh hotels, where it often was accompanied with instructions on how to peel it. That next year, Americans ate around 15 million bunches of bananas. Within a decade that had surged to 40 million, making them more popular than apples and oranges, as Dan Koeppel documents in his book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. At a time when apples and oranges were prohibitively expensive to most Americans, the banana was marketed for mass consumption .

United Fruit successfully styled it as the fruit of the common man, its popularity reflected in the slapstick ubiquity of slipping on banana peels found in the films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and other comedians, as Koeppel points out. ​ From there, United Fruit ramped up marketing to further the banana’s American conquest, hiring doctors to endorse mashed bananas as baby food and setting up a “ home economics department ” to get images of bananas in front of housewives and in textbooks. After its test kitchens struck upon the idea of the banana as the perfect breakfast on the go, the company began offering coupons on cereal boxes, linking bananas and breakfast cereal for the first time, writes Koeppel. United Fruit marketing from the 1950s ingeniously targeted housewives and children. The image on the left appeared in Ladies Home Journal. (Flickr user jbcurio on the left; Flickr user Phil Beard on the right (images have been cropped)) To ramp up production while preserving its margins, United Fruit began burnishing its famously bloody reputation for union-busting.

(A 1928 crackdown on striking United Fruit workers in Colombia inspired the massacre in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude ). The strategic importance of the crop meant that the troops of both Latin American dictatorships—the namesake of “banana republics”—and the US government often enforced United Fruit’s will on unruly workers. The twilight of the Gros Michel However, in 1903, United Fruit encountered an enemy that all the military interventions in the world couldn’t stop. It first showed up in Panama—a blight that wilted leaves and infected fruits until the entire plant toppled over and died, usually before it could bear any fruit. Once it appeared, it laid waste to a region’s plantations, usually at a gradual pace, but sometimes with devastating speed. It needed only five years to wipe out all of Suriname’s banana plantations. As you undoubtedly guessed, the pestilence in question is none other than Panama disease, Race 1. As whole plantations failed, United Fruit and others made the obvious choice: they picked up and moved somewhere else in Latin America. But the blight followed. After it wiped out plantations in Costa Rica, Panama disease followed United Fruit to Guatemala.

And then to Nicaragua, then Colombia and then Ecuador. By 1960, 77 years after it had appeared, Panama disease had wiped the Gros Michel out of every export plantation on the face of the planet. Why was Panama disease unstoppable? In the Gros Michel’s rise and fall, the banana industry struggled with the paradox that plagues all industrial agriculture crops. Natural reproduction is bad for short-term profits. The way to grow a consistent product at yields that achieve economies of scale is to stamp out the risks of diversity and imperfection that happens when genes reshuffle. To boost profit, you then grow that crop to the exclusion of less valuable species. This is what’s called a “monoculture” or “monocrop,” the cultivation of a single plant species, usually on a massive, standardized scale. These things come at a cost, though. Just as their genetic similarity makes for cheap, large-scale production, it also prevents monocrops from adapting to attack from pests or disease.

(Other disastrous consequences of monocrops include that farmers soak their crops in ever-increasing amounts of harmful chemicals and that this scale of growing is incredibly taxing on the environment.) An eviction of Irish farmers during the potato famine of 1847-1850. (Flickr user Inf-Lite Teacher (this image has been cropped)) Another notorious monoculture disaster: the Irish Potato Famine No episode in history illustrates this cost more nightmarishly than the Irish potato blight, “the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly,” as journalist Michael Pollan called it in his book Botany of Desire. Introduced to Ireland two centuries earlier, the potato had by the early 1800s become a staple crop for farmers, a principal source of food for the poor and a major fodder crop for livestock. The vast majority of Irish farmers were planting a single potato species, the Irish Lumper, to the exclusion of other potato types. When a Mexican fungus-like microorganism hit Ireland, it encountered virtually no natural resistance, destroying around three-quarters of Ireland’s 1846 potato harvest. The blight eventually wiped out one million people between 1845 and 1852.

As much as one-quarter of Ireland’s population either fled or died. Pollan makes an unnerving point about this tragedy. Many of the one million who died “probably owed their existence to the potato in the first place.” In other words, Ireland’s large-scale potato monoculture supported a bigger population than growing a more diverse range of crops would have; when that extra food disappeared, so did they. Bananas for sale in Cuba. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa) So why was there no Latin American Banana Famine? Panama disease’s scorched earth campaign was briefly terrible for United Fruit and for many Latin American economies. It was frustrating enough for US consumers to have inspired the song “ Yes, We Have No Bananas .” But a tropical reprise of the Irish potato famine it wasn’t. There are many reasons for this, but a big one is simply that Lumper potatoes were an Irish staple; poor banana farmers in Latin America largely didn’t eat Gros Michel bananas—they were an export good, a nice-to-have snack in wealthy countries. When it came to feeding themselves, farmers in Latin America and the Caribbean had plenty of alternative bananas—species too thin-skinned to be exported or too weird-looking for Westerners to buy.

Since Panama disease—remember, this is Race 1 we’re talking about—killed only the Gros Michel and a couple other types of bananas, plantains, as the type of banana commonly consumed in Latin America and Africa are known, were unscathed. Plus, there was a huge yellow life raft in the form of the Race 1-resistant Cavendish, which Standard Fruit started rolling out in 1947. The rest of Big Banana eventually followed suit, ramping up plantations to produce more sterile Cavendish clones than ever. Soon it wasn’t just the multinationals; because Cavendish plants are so productive, farmers growing subsistence crops for local consumption took to growing them as well. Now around 60% of the 40 million tonnes of Cavendishes grown each year is eaten locally, not exported. It might have tasted blander, but the Cavendish is way more productive than the Gros Michel. ("The Role of Demand in the Historical Development of the Banana Market," Marcelo Bucheli) How did Tropical Race 4 get to be so much deadlier than Race 1?

While United Fruit and Standard Fruit—which soon morphed into Chiquita and Dole, respectively—and other banana giants built booming businesses around Cavendish clones, Panama disease was busy too. The banana industry then did the fungus a huge favor: In the 1980s it launched huge Cavendish plantations in Malaysia, one of the ancient cradles of banana civilization. That’s where University of Florida’s Ploetz thinks Panama disease originally came from. Even though it’s famed as the scourge of Latin America, the fungus is actually the natural foe of Malaysian wild bananas. That’s why moving banana production to Asia was such a bad move; wherever you find the most highly adapted wild bananas, you’re likely to find the most highly adapted diseases. For many millennia, an evolutionary bloodsport between Panama disease and wild bananas has raged on in Malaysian jungles. While the fungus made sure wild bananas passed on only the best genes for survival, wild bananas kept the fungus primed for lethal combat. When the fungus was brought to Latin America in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel never stood a chance. This, after all, was a fungus born to kill the most evolved banana species out there.

Wiping out a sterile mutant with no natural resistance was a cakewalk. The Cavendish was clearly made of tougher stuff. But that helped it only against Race 1, the strain of Panama disease that had been transplanted to Latin America more than a century ago. In the intervening years, the pathogen that stayed in Malaysia kept adapting and out-adapting Malaysian wild bananas. And that’s why Tropical Race 4 is so much more lethal: It’s a fungus with 100 extra years of banana-killing evolution under its belt. Big Banana’s global conquest didn’t create Tropical Race 4. But it did help “select” it, says Ploetz. By building its business on a monoculture, the big exporters made their species sitting ducks for constantly adapting strains of Panama disease. And by moving banana production around the globe, far beyond the species’ natural habitats, companies ensured that species became host for a vicious disease against which the vast majority of cultivated bananas had no defenses. The good news, relatively speaking, was that in the last 20 years it’s been confined to Asia and Australia.

But its sudden appearance in Mozambique and Jordan last year puts it closer to devastating global banana and plantain production—in a way the world has never before seen. A fruit market in Lahore. (AP Photo/ K.M.Chaudary) Tropical Race 4 and a global banana famine All this might seem alarmist, particularly given how slowly Panama disease typically spreads. Big Banana, for one, would agree with that. “This is something that this industry has dealt with for decades,” said Chiquita’s Ed Lloyd. “It’s not a ‘sky is falling’ sort of situation.” To some extent, University of Florida’s Ploetz agrees. “Bananas aren’t going to go extinct—they’re not going to disappear,” he says. “What [Dole and Chiquita] have in their favor is that it’s not going to move through their plantation like wildfire… But the problem is its cryptic nature: Once you have it you don’t know how widespread it is.” The picture’s much different when you look beyond exported bananas. Tropical Race 4 doesn’t have to spread that fast to start shrinking the food supply for the 400 million people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean who depend on bananas for basic sustenance.

The fact that it’s now in Africa is distressing considering that 227 million people —many of them small-scale farmers—are already underfed. ​Africa’s production share probably higher due to underreported plantain and other food banana production.​ And while Chiquita and other big banana multinationals shrug off its threat to Latin America, it doesn’t sound like they’re taking into account the possibilities that Ploetz flags, such as the Latin American farmers setting up plantations in the affected Mozambique area. Did they scrub their shoes well enough? Time will tell. Though the banana panic won’t hit tomorrow, the nature of Tropical Race 4 and the fact that scientists haven’t yet found a viable back-up banana to sub in for the Cavendish means an eventual production collapse is inevitable. What might that look like? In the crude terms that Pollan invoked with the Irish potato famine, the population that owes much of its survival to cheap, productive banana plants is the one that will shoulder the impact when those plants die. If the same huge numbers of the banana-eating global population are going to stay fed, the only viable solution at the moment may be genetic modification.

On that front, there are promising signs , though still nothing to take to the bank. While some find the genetically modified alternative objectionable , it’s hard to argue against modifying an already pretty heavily genetically tweaked fruit given the scale of malnourishment or perhaps even starvation, if that’s what it comes down to. But the GMO lightning rod distracts from the larger cautionary tale: Our reliance on monoculture to feed surging global populations is catching up with us. International agricultural organizations are already scrambling to find new scourge-resistant substitutes for things like rice and potatoes. In fact, so dire are other global agricultural problems that Tropical Race 4’s onslaught doesn’t even get bananas near the top of priority list. “Getting support to develop new resistant bananas is really tough—there are already so many demands on the international agricultural community,” says Ploetz.

“There’s a lot of hunger in the world and bananas just have to get in line behind all those other big problems.” Read full story Panama Disease The problems related to Panama disease are complicated: The biological issue Quite simply, despite the world’s best efforts and major investments, scientists still don’t know enough about the biology and genetics of the causative fungus; and the other challenge is the need for greater genetic diversity among banana cultivars. This would prevent the disastrous epidemics that threaten the entire current production. The environmental issue Thus, first and foremost, a disease resistant banana is the best basis for a healthy banana. As long as we keep growing susceptible cultivars, this is labour lost in terms of disease control. Chemicals tend to be too toxic for other soil life to use against this disease and therefore prohibited in most regions, so other solutions must be found. One option is biological soil fumigation, or bio-control based on organisms found in so-called ‘suppressive soils’. While crop diversity in general helps substantially in managing disease outbreaks, Fusarium produces resting spores that survive in soil for decades - in other words, current eradicant measures are needed to control Panama disease.

The human factor The entire industry involves millions of people directly or indirectly associated with banana production and trade. In Costa Rica alone, nearly 100,000 jobs rely directly or indirectly on banana production – that's about eight percent of the country's total employment. Banana cultivation is characterised by a great variety of producers: Small holders, industrial plantations and back-yard plantings to name a few. In addition to this, many bananas simply grow on the roadside as weeds and plenty are abandoned sick plants that continue to represent potential disease foci. Panama disease therefore acts on different scales: Plant, field, farm, region, country and even continent. State-level &amp; international cooperation and integrated research are indispensable to finding solutions in all of these domains and scales. This requires multilevel solutions, as well as concerted action on the part of all stakeholders as both smallholders and plantation owners suffer from the same problems. Cooperative research and knowledge exchange on all levels are indispensable. Effective disease management requires concerted action in a complex environment with different geographical and cultural dimensions. National and international regulations and policies are crucial to managing Panama disease and to preventing its dissemination to areas that are still free.

‘Disease resistance is the best basis for a healthy banana’ Research programmes Here you can find information on Panama disease research programmes and their constituent projects. Growers, researchers, commercial companies and government institutions are working together on crop protection, food security and innovation. This will help to manage the dissemination of the deadly Fusarium fungus and sustain the livelihoods of the millions of people who depend on the banana. Luud Clercx, about the threat of Panama disease Has worked for TASTE since 2007. TASTE stands for Technical Assistance for Sustainable Trade & Environment, a foundation run by Agrofair in Barendrecht. Before that, he spent more than 20 years living in Latin-America, working in rural development. Active in the World Banana Forum (WBF) as coordinator of the WBF Task Force TR4. If Panama disease continues to spread, it will have disastrous consequences for both the export sector and for the food security of millions of people. The export sector accounts for 15% of the production. The other 85% of bananas are produced for local consumption. A large proportion of these cultivars, and also cooking bananas, are susceptible to Panama disease.

More research is needed to find out which varieties are susceptible, and to what extent. We also need a rough overview of where these vulnerable varieties are grown to analyse the risks and devise plans to prevent the disease from spreading. It may take quite some time before a resistant variety of banana is developed and will become available on a scale large enough to replace the vulnerable varieties. However, the question is whether a massive replacement is desirable: this would mean a further impoverishment of the great diversity of banana varieties sold on local markets. Wasn’t the narrow genetic base of banana cultivation a main risk factor in the spread of the Panama disease? And will small producers have the means to replant their plots with a resistant variety? It looks like that producers and farming communities in many places will simply have to learn to live with Panama disease. This is where agro-ecological innovation comes in. We have to work on developing new, less one-sided production systems to ensure that the Cavendish and other varieties of banana are less susceptible to Panama disease. Hypotheses about disease suppressive soils seem to be pointing in this direction, but more research still needs to be carried out.

Research is also needed into the cost price of a commercial Cavendish banana produced in the TR4 era, in which preventive and possible quarantine measures will be day-to-day practice. ‘We have to work on agro-ecological innovations to make varieties less susceptible to Panama disease’ Louise O. Fresco, about the threat of panama disease President of the Executive Board of Wageningen UR. Former Assistant Director-General, Agriculture, FAO and Professor at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With her wide agricultural experience, particularly in the developing world, she wholeheartedly supports banana research. As mentioned in my recent Science Editorial “The GMO Stalemate in Europe”, the lack of trust in genetically modified organisms reflects a wider distrust of science. This is so unfortunate as, also in case of banana, science should be the driver for change. Clearly banana research is urgently required. The tremendous threat of Panama disease is accelerated by the low genetic diversity of commercial banana crops around the world. This is clearly unsustainable and almost unmanageable. I continue to call for genetic modification of vegetatively propagated crops, such as cassava and banana, as a short-term solution for urgent needs of the poor, particularly when a GM approach is embedded in multidisciplinarity.

Therefore, I am truly pleased with the multidisciplinary approach that is taken in this impressive suite of INREF and KNAW-SPIN projects ‘I continue to call for genetic modification of vegetatively propagated crops like banana’ P.O. Box 69 T. +31 317 48 06 32 @. info@panamadisease.org Banana Emergency Strikes Costa Rica – ThinkProgress Banana Emergency Strikes Costa Rica In 2012, bananas exports from Costa Rica were worth $815 million. CREDIT: A.P. IMAGES By Joanna M. Foster A “banana emergency” sounds almost comic, but it’s anything but funny when bananas are your staple food source and income, and the emergency is an insect infestation that threatens to destroy that all-important crop. That’s exactly the situation in Costa Rica, where on Tuesday, officials from the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry’s State Phytosanitary Services, (SFE) issued a statement declaring a national crop emergency for bananas. In 2012, Costa Rica exported more than 1.2 million tons of fresh bananas worth $815 million according to the Foreign Trade Promotion office.

This year’s crop could be substantially less thanks to an outbreak of scale insects and mealybugs. Currently the pests have spread across 24,000 hectares of plantations in the country’s Atlantic region. While the two insects don’t damage bananas to the point where they are actually inedible, they do cause unappetizing blemishes that will not be accepted by exporters. Scale insects and mealybugs are related to aphids, and like aphids, they feed on plant sap, which weakens the plant and causes the leaves to drop. They also excrete a sticky substance called “honeydew,” which causes the growth of sooty mold on fruit. SFE Director, Magda González, told The Tico Time s that climate change is helping the infestation spread. “Climate change, by affecting temperature, favors the conditions under which the insects reproduce,” González said. Changes in rain patterns are also making the problem worse. Gonzalez estimated that these conditions could shorten the insects’ reproduction cycle by one third. “I can tell you with near certainty that climate change is behind these pests,” she told The Tico Times.

Costa Rica’s immediate response to the outbreak has been to import more plastic bags impregnated with the pesticides buprofezin and bifenthrin. The bags are wrapped around individual banana bunches to protect the fruit from the destructive pests. Bananas are extremely vulnerable to a wide variety of diseases, but because there is extremely little genetic variation in the commercial crop. Costa Rica has been under pressure to use fewer pesticides on its banana plantations after a recent study highlighted the fact that these chemicals were washing into streams, killing fish, and accumulating in the bodies of higher predators, like the rare, small crocodile, the spectacled caiman. Globally, the future of bananas in a changing climate is an uncertain one. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, CGIAR, recently suggested that bananas may replace crops like potatoes as those lowly tubers are driven north by warmer temperatures. But currently, some of the world’s biggest banana growing regions are battling crop-killing disease, making a world of more bananas seem less likely. An outbreak of Panama disease , caused by the fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense, has spread from banana plantations in Southeast Asia to Jordan and Mozambique.

Banana producers from Africa to Latin America are bracing for a potential epidemic. The fungus causes a deadly rot and is notoriously difficult to eradicate from soil once present. In addition to being a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, nearly 400 million people in developing nations depend on bananas for food.

Question: Panama disease destroys what crop?
Answer: Bananas