Bananas are at risk of extinction due to a fungal pandemic.

A deadly fungal epidemic is threatening banana plantations in Southeast Asia and spreading across the world, prompting scientists to issue warnings about the risk of banana extinction.

Cavendish bananas are threatened with extinction by Panama disease. Photo: Telegraph.

According to research published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands have discovered a soil-borne fungus called Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense, also known as Panama disease, which has the potential to wipe out the global banana industry, worth $11 billion.

By tracing the genetic structure of the fungus, the research team discovered that a strain of Panama disease fungus called Tropical Race 4 is killing Cavendish bananas, the most common type of banana in the world.

Gert Kema, a banana expert at Wageningen University and co-author of the study, said Tropical Race 4 was discovered in the 1960s in Indonesia and subsequently spread to Taiwan, China, and other Southeast Asian countries. In every country affected by the pandemic, banana exports gradually declined over several decades. After several years of widespread disease, a drop in production was inevitable.

Panama disease attacks the vascular system of banana plants, causing them to wilt rapidly and turn yellowish-brown due to lack of water. Part of the problem is that farmers cannot eradicate the fungus, only control it. But efforts to control the outbreak have been ineffective.

According to Kema, the fungus has now spread to Pakistan, Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Mozambique, and the northeastern Australian state of Queensland, and has the potential to spread to Latin America in a short time. Latin America supplies more than three-fifths of the world's banana exports.

In the 1800s, a similar Panama disease epidemic swept through the Gros Michel banana population, the most commonly consumed banana variety at the time. The Gros Michel bananas were wiped out, but British scientists preserved a small number of a similar variety, the Cavendish banana, to study and demonstrate its resistance to the original fungal strain.

For over 50 years, Cavendish bananas have been a popular item in grocery stores, but research notes that while they are resistant to the Panama disease that wiped out Gros Michel, they cannot withstand the attack of the Tropical Race 4 strain.

The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the world's banana population lacks genetic diversity because each seed is cloned, meaning they don't evolve. This leaves the plants with no ability to defend themselves against diseases. Meanwhile, banana consumption today is much higher than it was 40 years ago.

According to the research team, finding a new banana variety is not easy. "The process of developing a new banana variety requires significant investment in research and development, along with recognition of bananas as a global fruit and a major income crop, providing livelihoods for millions of farmers," the researchers concluded.

According to VNE