Re: Deadly Panama Disease Threatens Bananas Worldwide

Tropical Race 4 and a global banana famine

"All this might seem alarmist, particularly given how slowly Panama disease typically spreads. Big Banana, for one, would agree with that. “This is something that this industry has dealt with for decades,” said Chiquita’s Ed Lloyd. “It’s not a ‘sky is falling’ sort of situation.”

To some extent, University of Florida’s Ploetz agrees. “Bananas aren’t going to go extinct—they’re not going to disappear,” he says. “What [Dole and Chiquita] have in their favor is that it’s not going to move through their plantation like wildfire… But the problem is its cryptic nature: Once you have it you don’t know how widespread it is.”

The picture’s much different when you look beyond exported bananas. Tropical Race 4 doesn’t have to spread that fast to start shrinking the food supply for the 400 million people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean who depend on bananas for basic sustenance. The fact that it’s now in Africa is distressing considering that 227 million people—many of them small-scale farmers—are already underfed."


Here's a lengthy article that shows maps, statistics,timelines, and maybe more than you ever wanted to know about bananas...
http://qz.com/164029/tropical-race-4-global-banana-industry-is-killing-the-worlds-favorite-fruit/

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