Stalling a disease that could annihilate banana production is a high-return investment in Colombia

Hundreds of millions of dollars in banana exports from Colombia are at risk due to a fungal disease best known as Tropical Race 4 (TR4). First detected in Asia in the 1990s, the Fusarium fungus that causes the disease arrived in Colombia in 2019, completing its inevitable global spread to South America, the last major banana production continent that remained TR4-free. Researchers are confident a solution will be found but until then, slowing the spread is the only effective strategy.

The good news is that simple, effective measures are already happening in Colombia. These include building cement paths between banana plots, fencing them, and installing disinfectant stations at farm entry points. Measures like this are worth the investment. Researchers at the Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT found banana producers can expect a 3-4 USD return per dollar invested.

“The solutions are not extremely technical, they just require money and awareness,” said Thea Ritter, an Alliance researcher. “We found the potential benefits are very large. We urge industry and the government to continue making the needed investments and accelerate ongoing efforts to educate producers and communities about TR4. If it spreads more, it will devastate local and national economies.”

The research was published Oct. 30 in PLOS ONE, in likely the first socioeconomic study of its kind in the Americas. Ritter and colleagues researched TR4 in the Colombian departments of Antioquia and Magdalena, two large export-oriented banana production areas because they found no farm-level research on TR4 in the country. Results found considerable, little-understood local and cultural impacts of the TR4 threat. These intangible details of the study paint a broader picture of what banana crop decimation could mean for the thousands of livelihoods that depend on the industry.