Is bananageddon coming to Queensland?

Late last year the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations renewed its warning of the growing threat to the banana industry from the spread of a new strain of a fungus causing wilting and mass plant die-offs. Tropical Race 4 (TR4) of the Fusarium wilt fungus, said the FAO,  is considered a top threat to global banana production worth $36-billion, which provides a source of income or food to some 400 million people. Now that fungus, having devastated production in the Northern Territory, has spread to Queensland's premier growing region.

State Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Agriculture Minister Bill Byrne met with banana farmers and industry leaders in the far north Queensland town of Tully on Wednesday. The ABC reported that the visit came as Biosecurity Queensland announced that further test results had reinforced the initial finding of a case of Tropical Race 4 Panama disease on a Tully banana plantation.

Chief biosecurity officer Dr Jim Thompson said these results were from the original samples taken from the farm last month, which showed an initial positive result. "We sent those samples to Darwin for the same type of DNA (PCR) testing and just like our findings last week they have come back positive," he said. "It backs up our initial positive diagnosis and supports our approach of immediately quarantining the site."

Ms Palaszczuk said she had spoken to the owners of the infected property. "Biosecurity, I'm satisfied, is doing a very good job up here, and we'll continue to monitor the situation," she said."I know how important this industry is to Queensland and how important this industry is to the nation. The Government will do everything that we possibly can to assist."

And that everything might in truth be very little. Fusarium wilt spreads rapidly through soil, water and contact with contaminated farm equipment and vehicles, making swift responses essential to preventing incursions and outbreaks. Once soil is contaminated with the fungus, an affected field becomes unfit for producing bananas susceptible to the disease for up to three decades.

After a conference in December 2014 the FAO developed plans for a new intervention-and-prevention program on Fusarium wilt that would work on three main fronts of action: preventing future outbreaks, managing existing cases, and strengthening international collaboration and coordination among institutions, researchers, governments and producers. The plans came on the coattails of a recent case in Mozambique, prompting an FAO emergency project in December to contain the fungus in the African country.

Earlier outbreaks of the TR4 strain of the Fusarium wilt disease, colloquially known as Panama Disease, brought Indonesia's banana exports of more than 100,000 tonnes annually to a grinding halt, causing annual losses of some $134 million in revenue in Sumatra alone. Currently the disease is severely affecting more than 6,000 ha in Philippines and 40,000 ha in China. ...

History repeating itself The spreading of the new Fusarium wilt strain TR4 has raised fears of a repetition of the disastrous outbreak of the disease in the early 1900's, when a different strain of the fungus (Race 1) spread like a wildfire across Latin America, causing over $2 billion in losses and nearly decimating the global banana export industry.
The world's export banana was saved only by switching from the Gros Michel banana - then the industry favourite - to the Cavendish, which is resistant to Race 1.
Cavendish served the global banana supply and export industry well so far. But the TR4 strain of the fungus is forcing the industry, scientific community and governments to once again find alternative banana varieties to replace the Cavendish type.