Forecasting the death of citrus

Philip White is trying to give us nightmares. His piece in this morning's InDaily signals the end of vodka and orange, a slice of lemon in the gin and tonic and even the future production of Cointreau and Curaçao.
Get ready, he writes. Huanglongbing– The Yellow Dragon – is coming as foreshadowed by Professor David Mabberley, a pre-eminent international botanist who came to Adelaide as a guest of the Botanic Gardens of South Australia, in a speech last week.

When it hits, this disease is so deadly to the citrus tree that it dies before there’s much chance to investigate it or attempt to fix it. The blight was first spotted in China in 1943; Mabberley believes it came from a gene that jumped into a bacterium, Candidatus liberibacter, which is spread by a bug, the Asian citrus psyllid, Diaphorina citri, and by grafting.

The Yellow Dragon kills the plant quickly and efficiently by interfering with its phloem, its blood. Leaves mottle and yellow then fall off, while the twigs look like they have die-back and the fruit greens and turns bitter and next thing you know your tree is one dead parrot. Deceased.

This scourge is now in every major citrus-growing region on Earth, except Australia. It is in New Guinea, waiting for the right wind. It is destroying the orchards of Florida and California to the extent that the OJ-addicted US is beginning to be dependent on South America for its fruit. But the Dragon’s there, too. It’s all through South-East Asia, India, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.