‘Once the soil is contaminated, there’s no hope of elimination’: The disease destroying bananas

Just as Covid-19 has no current treatment, neither does fusarium wilt, a disease ravaging the world’s most popular fruit and a $25bn industry, write Alan Crawford and Stephan Kueffner

Clean of the crop: bunches of the fruit are hand washed with detergent to remove any insects and residual contamination on a plantation in Milagro, Ecuador (Bloomberg/Vicente Gaibor)

In the banana plantations of the tropical lowlands of Ecuador, workers are being issued with protective clothing and disinfectant is provided for their tools.

The safety precautions implemented in the farms that stretch between the Andes and the Pacific coast are not simply to guard against the coronavirus. They’re a foretaste of what will be required to shield the valuable crop against another disease, one that poses an existential threat to a $25bn industry.

Bananas have a claim to be the modern world’s first globalised product and are still the most exported fruit on the planet. Yet the trade that began some 130 years ago is now a potent symbol of the underlying fragility of globalisation. How it adapts and responds may suggest a path towards rebuilding international consensus in the post-pandemic era.