Bananas are the most pop yield in the world , but they could soon be killed off by a deadly fungus . In the last few years , a banana tree - kill disease has spread from Southeast Asia to the Middle East , Africa and Australia .
accord to a new study , published inPLOS Pathogens , the culprit is yell Tropical Race 4 ( TR4 ) , which originated in Indonesia in the sixties and has now spread so widely that it ’s threatening the man banana yield .
In the discipline , they call for major investment into the education of Modern varieties of banana and better analysis and quarantine of contaminated grease . " The current TR4 epidemic and inherent orbicular attention should be the wake - up call for these much needed scheme changes , " they say in the newspaper .
This is not the first time bananas are on the verge of extinction . In the 1950s , almost all Gros Michel bananas ( the main case of banana farm at the time ) were wipe out by thePanama disease , make by the fungal pathogenFusarium oxysporum . A Modern metal money of banana , resistant to the fungus , was introduced in the touched expanse , eff as the Cavendish .
Today , the Cavendish account for47 percent of the integral productionof banana , and the vast majority of the banana sold in the temperate regions of the globe are Cavendish , but it is now at scourge from TR4 . This disease is also a strain ofFusarium oxysporum , but is produced from a different stock to the Panama disease . TR4 enters the base of banana tree plants and obtrude upon the vascular system , spreading and making the plant die of desiccation .
waste bananas have many hard seed in them , via Wikimedia Commons
It ’s difficult to engender fungus - resistant bananas . All Cavendish plant are clones , exact copies of each other , and so are the Gros Michel plants . If an illness impress one plant , it will affect all the others . All bananas number from the heedful facts of life of wild banana , until a seedless materialization is mould . This makes bring out more seedless bananas easy , but launch the plant to the possibility of annihilating diseases that can pass over out intact plantations .
The study does n’t quite annunciate the " bananapocalypse , " but the scientists have looked at the evidence from around the man and spotlight that we have developed no way to stop the spread of the disease . So far , measure to destroy the fungus , such as putting infected soil or banana in quarantine , have been inadequate and uneffective .
Banana cropsare mostly producedby humble - holder farms and 85 percentage of the production last to local securities industry . The disease could take off the livelihood ofmillions of peoplearound the world . Researchers think that the disease will cover to spread as long fungus - susceptible diversity are being grown .
[ H / T : Quartz ]
