A new deadly new fungus has been found on several plantations and has the potential to wipe out the world's banana supply.
According to Science Journal Nature, the fungus known as the Panama disease or Fusarium, has made its way across several plantations globally. The fungus, which recently turned up at banana plantations in Mozambique and Jordan, have scientists reportedly fearing the fungus may spread. The popular Cavendish banana variety, which accounts for nearly all of the world's global export trade, could be threatened.
The Nature reported there are fears that the next stop will be Latin America, the world's largest banana exporter. The fungus was reportedly confined in Asia. According a website devoted to Panama Disease, Panama disease was first identified in Taiwan In the early 1990s. It later spread to Malaysia, and parts of Australia, where is reportedly caused extensive damage. There's been reports that the fungus has also spread to parts of Africa.
"I'm incredibly concerned," said Gerta Kema, a researcher at Wageningen University and research Centre in the Netherlands and a co-author of an article on the fungus in the journal Plant Disease.
In the 1950s, a similar outbreak, which included a strain of the Fusarium fungus nearly wiped out the Gros Michel cultivar, similar to the Cavendish variety, in Central and South America. However, the Cavendish is not resistant to this newest Fusarium strain.
"Given today's modes of travel, there's almost no doubt that it will hit the major Cavendish crops," Randy Ploetz, a plant pathologist at the University of Florida who studied the new strain of fungus, told Popular Science back in 2008.
Bananas are grown in more than 130 countries and 100 billion bananas are consumed around the world each year. Behind wheat, rice and corn, banana is considered the most important food crop, with only 15 percent of the annual crops exported, mainly from the U.S. and Europe. The remaining 85 percent is locally consumed. Researchers call the spreading impact a race against time.
"A concerted international approach is now needed to prevent the spread of Panama disease and, in the worst-case scenario, contain it," said Kema.
Costa Rica recently declared a "banana emergency" due to an outbreak of insects that were feeding on the fruits and leaving them "unsightly blemishes." Magda González, director of the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry's State Phytosanitary Services, is reportedly blaming climate change as the reason behind the country's pest problem.
"Climate change, by affecting temperature, favors the conditions under which [the insects] reproduce," González told The Tico Times.
