Bananas are in danger of extinction because of a fungal pandemic

A toxic fungal epidemic is threatening Southeast Asian banana fields and spreading around the world, prompting scientists to warn about bananas.

According to research published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, scientists at Wageningen University, Netherlands, discovered a fungus growing from soil called Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense or Panama disease , has the ability to erase the $ 11 billion banana industry worldwide.

Following the genetic makeup of the fungal strain, the team found that a form of the Panama pathogen fungus Tropical Race 4 is killing dead pepper plants, the world's most popular banana.

Gert Kema, a banana expert at Wageningen University, co-authored, said Tropical Race 4 was discovered in the 1960s in Indonesia, then spread to Taiwan, China, and Southeast Asian countries. other. In every country hit by a pandemic, banana export output has been declining over the past few decades. After several years of widespread disease, declining output is inevitable.

Pepper is threatened with extinction by the Panama epidemic.(Photo: Telegraph).

Panama disease attacks the vascular system of banana plants, causing them to wilt quickly and turn yellowish brown due to lack of water. Part of the problem is that farmers cannot eradicate this fungus but can only restrain it. But efforts to contain the disease are not effective.

According to Kema, the fungus has now entered Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Mozambique and Queensland state in northeastern Australia, and is capable of raging in Latin America after a short time. Latin America is the place where more than 3/5 of the bananas are exported on the planet.

In the 1800s, a similar Panamanian pandemic swept across the Gros Michel banana population, the most popular banana consumed at the time. Gros Michel bananas were wiped out but British scientists retained a small amount of similar bananas as pepper bananas to study and prove they were resistant to the original fungus.

For more than 50 years, bananas have become a popular commodity in fruit and vegetable stores, but the study notes that despite resistance to the Panama disease by the Panama disease, it cannot resist the onslaught of Tropical Race 4. .

The situation gets worse when the world's banana populations do not have a diverse genome because each seed is cloned, meaning they do not evolve. This causes the plant to lose its defense against the disease. Meanwhile, bananas consumption today is larger than 40 years ago.

According to the research team, finding a new banana is not easy."The process of developing new bananas requires a large investment in research and development, along with the recognition of bananas as a global fruit and the main income crop, creating livelihoods for millions of farmers" , The researchers concluded.