Ugandan Banana with wilting disease (courtesy UN FAO)
BXW (banana xanthomonas wilt) is probably the worst disease facing the worldwide banana crop today. Fast-moving and incurable, it threatens Africa’s vital subsistence bananas, and has been spreading rapidly through the regions where people rely on the fruit for as much as eighty percent of their daily nutrition.
A report issued this week by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says that a pilot education program in Africa that trained farmers in clean production techniques – quarantine measures designed to isolate farms from each other to stop the spread of the disease – effectively reduced transmission to zero percent.
“Today you do not find banana wilt disease in any of the districts where the field schools have been established, which were at one time the front line hot spots in this effort,” an FAO official was quoted as saying.
This is a major development. Quarantine and farmer education programs can be successful, but they’re often tough to implement. Stopping BXW in Uganda (the term FAO uses is BBW, for “Banana Bacterial Wilt”) will go a long way toward ensuring security in a region that desperately needs a reliable food supply.
There’s a detailed article and more pictures here.
Here’s an earlier posting on BXW.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
