It’s bananas: global food crisis warning that the Asia-Pacific can’t afford to ignore
- The deadly Panama disease fungus has arrived in South America, threatening the world banana trade and highlighting species vulnerability amid climate change
- The Cavendish banana is in the vanguard of a food security challenge that can only get more severe. Apec food ministers’ silence on this in Chile was inexplicable
For Apec food ministers returning to their capitals last week from the first Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Food Security meeting in three years, all full of earnest commitments to better fisheries management, the use of technology to boost productivity, and reductions in food loss along global food supply chains, I offer just one word: bananas.
Fusarium, which unleashes the Tropical Race 4 strain of Panama disease (TR4 for short), first appeared in the early 1990s in Taiwanese soil samples, and quickly spread through Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, China and eventually into Australia in 2015.
Each effort to quarantine the plague has failed, and now that it is in South America – the world’s biggest exporting region for Cavendish bananas – the game is up. The region’s biggest exporter, Ecuador, is right next door to Colombia, as are other leading exporters Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panama.
Perhaps the one glimmer of good news is that the Philippines, which first found fusarium crucifying its Cavendish crops in the late 1990s, is still a massive banana producer, and remains the world’s second banana exporter after Ecuador, trading almost half of its annual crop of 7.5 million tonnes.
Fusarium may be fatal and incurable when it strikes, but it moves slowly, giving some breathing space for readjustment.