Panama and Sigatoka Disease
Two plant pathogens – popularly known as Panama and Sigatoka disease – have played leading roles in the history of export banana growing in the Caribbean and Latin America.
The significant of two disease varies over time and space.
In the early twentieth century, the fruit companies responded to Panama disease, a soil borne pathogen, by practicing what can be called “shifting plantation agriculture,” abandoning infected soils and removing infrastructure for reuse in areas where the disease was not present.
When Sigatoka appeared in the 1930s banana producers did not have time to run from the airborne fungal pathogen. Instead, United Fruit Company scientists in Honduras devised a capital – and labor intensive control system based on high volume Bordeaux spray (copper sulfate), the costs of which forced small scale growers to abandon the trade.
The farmworkers and other North Coast residents, the fruit companies’ efforts to control the two plant disease epidemics shaped livelihoods in important and long lasting ways.
Although human disease such as malaria have received more scholarly attention, the fungal pathogens that invaded Gros Michel banana plantations have arguably played a larger, albeit indirect role in shaping the daily lives of people in the North Coast’s zonas bananeras.
The historical significance of Panama and Sigatoka diseases cannot be explained entirely in terms of regional agroecological dynamics.
Complex interactions between pathogen, plant host and agroecosystem shaped the epidemics, but so too did the cultural, economic and social processes that gave rise to mass markets for banana in the United States.
Panama and Sigatoka Disease
