Disease Is Ravaging the World's $25 Billion Banana Industry

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The world’s most popular fruit is under siege. How it adapts now could be crucial to understanding the post-pandemic era.

n the banana plantations of the tropical lowlands of Ecuador, workers are being issued with protective clothing and disinfectant is provided for their tools.

The safety precautions implemented in the farms that stretch between the Andes and the Pacific coast are not simply to guard against the coronavirus. They’re a foretaste of what will be required to shield the valuable crop against another disease, one that poses an existential threat to a $25 billion industry.

Bananas have a claim to be the modern world’s first globalized product and are still the most exported fruit on the planet. Yet the trade that began some 130 years ago is now a potent symbol of the underlying fragility of globalization. How it adapts and responds may suggest a path toward rebuilding international consensus in the post-pandemic era.

The fiber and vitamin-rich fruit is such an everyday item that it’s easy to overlook the environmental, social and political issues inherent in where they come from, and the economic reality of what it takes to get them to supermarket shelves. Grown in the south and shipped to markets in the north, much of the supply chain put in place in the 19th century is still in use today.

Just as coronavirus ravages the world in the absence of a vaccine, so the banana disease fusarium wilt is marching inexorably around the globe, leaving a trail of scorched plantations in its wake. A strain known as Tropical Race 4 (TR4) first identified in Taiwan some two decades ago has spread throughout Asia to the Middle East and Africa before its arrival in the banana heartlands of Latin America late last year, when it was detected in Colombia.

It is considered among the most destructive of all plant diseases, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO. “Biosecurity measures” including “on-farm quarantine” are recommended to mitigate its spread, but as with Covid-19, there is no treatment. Once the soil is contaminated, there’s no hope of elimination; the only recourse is to abandon the land and move elsewhere.

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