A soil fungus has already killed the world's favourite banana once. A new strain, Tropical Race 4, is now working through the banana that replaced it. Where it has reached, what it is costing, and how we got here.
The world's largest exporter. Confirmed in December 2025 on a 7-hectare farm in El Oro, then on the neighbouring property in July 2026.
Exported 6.5 million tonnes in 2025.
For decades TR4 stayed in Asia and the Pacific. In 2013 it turned up on an export farm in Mozambique, the next year in Jordan, and in 2019 in Colombia: its first landfall in the Americas, where most of the world's export bananas grow.
This counts places, not damage. A first report can be one small farm, and reports lag: Bangladesh's came more than a year after the symptoms were seen.
World banana exports rose to 21.7 million tonnes in 2025, the most in five years. FAO also names TR4 among the forces shaping the trade: lost production, and the money spent keeping the fungus out.
That counts a country's whole exports, however little of it is affected: one outbreak in one province puts all of a country's shipments in this figure. It measures how close the fungus has come to the trade, not how much of the trade it has hit.
Latin America and the Caribbean shipped 71% of the world's exports in 2025. Before 2019, TR4 had never been found there.
The world's largest exporter, at 6.5 million tonnes. TR4 was confirmed on a 7-hectare farm in El Oro in December 2025, and on the neighbouring property in July 2026. Floods reached the area in October, and officials widened their surveillance ring from 5 to 8 km as a precaution.
How much of Mindanao's banana land was still working, according to the growers' association, with much of the rest ruined by the disease. New planting in the Cagayan Valley helped exports rebound about 30% in 2025, to 3 million tonnes.
From a half-hectare plot in Piura in April 2021 to more than 1,000 hectares of the Chira valley, by the regional agriculture office's count. Hundreds of small organic growers are affected, and the national emergency declared in 2021 still stands.
Taken out of production since 2019, the first outbreak in the Americas. Over 99% of the banana area was still free in 2024, with TR4 held by official order to La Guajira and Magdalena. Exports reached a record 2.6 million tonnes in 2025.
Hit within three years on one export farm, the first outbreak in Africa. By 2023 TR4 was known from 13 locations, up to 210 km from the first.
The only published loss estimates when they were reviewed in 2015: US$121 million in Indonesia, US$253 million in Taiwan and Malaysia. TR4 may by then have affected up to about 100,000 hectares worldwide. We found no newer global count.
The US import price was $1.12 a kilo in Sep 2026. That is +10% on a year earlier. Its high in the last 20 years was $1.68, in Dec 2022.
The price alone won't tell you what TR4 is doing: FAO lists weather, costs and demand among the things moving the trade, alongside disease. It is the number to watch if a big exporter's output starts to fall.
Until the 1950s the banana in almost every shop was the Gros Michel. A fungus in the soil wiped it out of the export trade, and the industry survived by switching to a banana that resisted it. That banana is the Cavendish, and it is the one dying now.
The export banana trade was built on one variety. It took the fungus about 70 years to bring it down, and the companies spent most of them running.
A wilting disease of bananas is recorded in Australia, half a world from where it will do its worst.
Growers see it in Gros Michel fields in Costa Rica and Panama. Railways have just made industrial banana farming possible, all of it on one variety. Panama lends the disease its name.
The cause is traced to a soil fungus, identified in Cuba: Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense.
With no cure, companies abandon infected farms and clear fresh forest, often carrying the fungus with them on infected planting material. More than 100,000 hectares of Central American plantations are destroyed: 30,000 in Honduras's Ulúa Valley alone, 6,000 around Quepos in Costa Rica in 12 years.
A novelty song becomes one of the year's great hits. Some have linked it to a shortage caused by the disease. Nobody has shown that it was.
Jamaica's governor says the final destruction of Gros Michel is a question of when, and that the island's industry depends on an immune variety the market will accept.
Running out of clean land, the companies replant with Cavendish, which resists the strain killing Gros Michel. By the 1960s the conversion is done. The losses come to at least US$2 billion in 2005 dollars, and the disease is soon forgotten as a threat to the trade.
| Then | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| The banana | Gros Michel, the variety behind nearly all export bananas. | Cavendish: just under half of world production, about 50 million tonnes a year, and the backbone of the export trade. |
| The fungus | Race 1 of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense. | Tropical Race 4, which also kills varieties that races 1 and 2 attack. |
| First seen | Australia in 1876; Costa Rica and Panama in 1890. | In Cavendish in Taiwan in the late 1960s; named in 1994. |
| Why it spread | One clone planted across a whole industry, moved on infected plant material. | The same. Sequencing suggests a single clone of the fungus is behind TR4's spread, moving on soil, tools, plants and water. |
| The toll | More than 100,000 hectares in Central America, and at least US$2 billion in 2005 dollars. | Still being counted. About 80% of the world's bananas and plantains are varieties TR4 can infect. |
| The way out | A resistant banana already growing, ready to replace it. | No replacement on the market. One GM variety approved but not grown commercially; the first bred line is expected around 2028. |
The banana that saved the trade resisted the strain that killed Gros Michel, not the fungus. The warnings came early.
Extremely vulnerable to a new disease, especially a tropical race of Fusarium wilt that could devastate the basis of the industry.
Long before anyone needs it, head gardener Joseph Paxton raises a banana from Mauritius at Chatsworth House and names it after his employers, the Cavendish family. Chatsworth counts it as the ancestor of almost every banana eaten in the West today.
Panama disease appears in Cavendish in Taiwan in the late 1960s. It is a new race of the same fungus.
Plant pathologist R. H. Stover warns that the export trade is extremely vulnerable to a tropical race of the wilt that could devastate the Cavendish varieties it rests on.
Within a few years, new Cavendish plantations in Southeast Asia begin to die. In 1994 the cause gets its name: Tropical Race 4.
A survey of commercial Cavendish farms confirms TR4 in Asia's biggest banana exporter. Epidemics follow across Mindanao.
TR4 turns up on an export farm in northern Mozambique, and is confirmed in Jordan the next year. It has left its home region.
Known near Darwin since 1997, TR4 reaches the Tully Valley, the heart of Australia's banana industry.
Colombia confirms TR4 on plantations in La Guajira, the first outbreak in the region where most export bananas grow.
Peru finds it on a half-hectare plot in Piura in April 2021. Venezuela confirms it in January 2023, on plantain as well as Cavendish.
Australia approves QCAV-4, a Cavendish given a resistance gene from a wild banana: the first GM Cavendish cleared to grow and eat. It isn't grown commercially.
A suspected outbreak is reported in September on a 7-hectare farm in El Oro, near the Peruvian border, and officially confirmed in December.
In July a second case is confirmed on the neighbouring property. In October floods reach the area, and officials widen their surveillance ring from 5 to 8 km.
Panama disease, or Fusarium wilt, is caused by a fungus that lives in the soil. It kills the plant and doesn't harm people: bananas from an affected farm are safe to eat.
Spores travel on boots, tools, vehicles, planting material and floodwater. In Peru, flooding in 2023 took monthly outbreaks from nine to 50.
The fungus enters through the roots and climbs the plant's water vessels, blocking them.
The older leaves yellow and hang down around the stem, and the stem stains brown inside. An affected plant stops being productive.
Spores can survive in the soil for up to 30 years with no banana in it. FAO says no effective fungicide or eradication method exists, so infected ground is largely lost to any banana the fungus can kill.
Nothing yet clears the fungus from the soil. The options are keeping it out and growing something it can't kill. FAO's open question is whether traders, retailers and shoppers will accept a different banana.
Disinfecting boots, tools and vehicles, sealing off infected plots and destroying plants. It slows the spread and buys time. It cures nothing.
Taiwan selected Cavendish variants that tolerate TR4, such as GCTCV-218, or Formosana, since planted widely in the Philippines. In Taiwan's trials about 4% of plants got sick, against 25 to 30% of a standard variety. In a three-year Australian trial it proved as susceptible as ordinary Cavendish.
QCAV-4 carries a resistance gene from a wild banana. One of 50 plants was infected after five crop cycles in its latest field trial. Australia approved it in 2024, but it isn't grown commercially, and a first trial in the Philippines was only planned for 2025.
North Queensland Banana Research and Honduras's FHIA breeding programme have 30 to 40 hybrids under evaluation and expect a first Cavendish line by 2028. A new banana also has to taste, ripen and ship like the old one, which is where FAO sees the doubt.
What the trade press and Latin American papers are saying, and EPPO's own reports on TR4.
Panama disease, or Fusarium wilt of banana, is caused by a soil fungus, Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense, that blocks the plant's water vessels and kills it. One strain, race 1, wiped the Gros Michel banana out of the export trade by the 1960s. A newer strain, Tropical Race 4 (TR4), attacks the Cavendish, the banana that replaced it.
No. More than 1,000 varieties of banana exist. What's at risk is the Cavendish as the cheap, uniform global banana, and the farms and jobs built on it.
Yes. Government and industry sources agree that the fungus kills the plant, isn't harmful to people and doesn't affect the fruit.
EPPO's list, updated August 31, 2026, has 29 countries and territories, 4 of them in the Americas: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. Ecuador, the world's largest exporter, confirmed its first case in December 2025. The globe at the top of this page has them all.
Last time a resistant variety was already available to plant. This time no such banana is on the market. The leading candidates are a GM Cavendish approved in Australia but not grown commercially, tolerant Cavendish clones with disputed field results, and new hybrids expected from 2028.
Avos reads the sources around the clock and emails you when something you follow changes.
Atlas, the Avos data engine, reads these sources a few times a day, and a new place on EPPO's list shows up on its own. The history and impact notes are written once from the sources linked beside them, with their dates; they don't update themselves.
The European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization's Global Database: where TR4 is and its status, the list FAO cites. It now has 29 places; FAO's 2025 review counted 24. First-report years come from EPPO's country pages and the papers they cite.
Full-year 2025 exports from FAO's Banana Market Review. The share of exports is our own sum: the exports of every country on EPPO's list, over the world total.
Monthly import prices from the World Bank, and headlines from an English and a Spanish news search, kept only if they name the disease and the banana. No model rewrites them.
For information only: not agricultural or investment advice, and not an official pest status. Follow your national plant protection organization. Sources: EPPO (2026) EPPO Global Database, gd.eppo.int. FAO. 2026. Banana Market Review 2025. Rome, CC BY 4.0; FAO does not endorse this page. World Bank Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet), CC BY 4.0.