When History Repeats: How Panama Disease Exposed the Fragility of Our Food System

At the turn of the 20th century, the banana was a symbol of global trade. Companies such as United Fruit cleared vast tracts of rainforest for plantations and built railways and communications infrastructure to link fields to ports. In Central America and the Caribbean, entire economies were dependent on a single crop: the Gros Michel banana.

Yet from the 1890s, banana plants in Panama—and soon Costa Rica—had been mysteriously dying [1]. The cause was Panama disease (or Fusarium Wilt disease), a fungal infection (Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense) that enters through the roots and chokes the plant from within. The fungus could persist in the soil for decades: once it arrived, the land was lost. There was no cure, and no way to plant again.

The disease spread to almost all banana producing regions across the following decades. Plantations were abandoned, with huge losses of livelihoods, and the banana industry aggressively pursued deforestation in order to claim land for new plantations [1]. By the 1950s, Gros Michel production was increasingly unviable, and the industry turned to a new variety: the Cavendish. Cavendish bananas, initially resistant to the disease, quickly replaced Gros Michel in international trade [2].

But the industry repeated its earlier mistake. Instead of diversifying, it put all its faith in a single variety. Because these bananas are seedless, they are bred through cloning, so are genetically identical [1]. If one plant is vulnerable, they all are.

That vulnerability became painfully clear when a new strain of Fusarium—Tropical Race 4 (TR4)—began infecting Cavendish bananas. It first appeared in Taiwan in the 1960s, though was only recognised as Fusarium in the 1990s [1]. By the 1990s it was spreading rapidly, devastating plantations in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and beyond. It has since been reported in the Middle East, Mozambique, and Australia.

Until recently, Latin America and the Caribbean—home to seven of the world’s ten largest banana producers—remained free of TR4 [3]. That changed in 2019, when the fungus was detected in Colombia. It has since been detected in Peru and Venezuela, raising fears of uncontrolled spread through this region.

This pathogen threatens not just an export commodity, but food security for the millions of people who rely on bananas and plantain as a staple crop. The losses from TR4 could be even greater than the devastation caused by the collapse of Gros Michel production [2].

Ultimately, we will need to move away from our dependence on the Cavendish banana, and find more diverse cultivars with resistance to Panama disease [2]. But in the meantime, new tools are offering ways to manage this threat. Molecular diagnostics can now detect pathogens in plants, soil, and water before symptoms appear [1]. Remote sensing and satellite data can detect early signs of plant stress across regions, while disease models can forecast likely outbreak zones—helping trigger timely alerts for quarantine or containment.

Panama disease is a stark reminder of the heavy costs that plant disease outbreaks can inflict—particularly on export-reliant economies and smallholder farmers. But it also underscores a broader, ongoing vulnerability: our food systems remain deeply vulnerable to disease outbreaks, especially when built around monocultures and narrow genetic diversity. As the spread of TR4 shows, without greater resilience, surveillance, and diversification, the impacts of the next outbreak may be even more severe.