Panama Disease Tropical Race 4

A soilborne strain of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense that attacks the Cavendish banana, the cultivar that supplies the great majority of the world's banana export trade, after an earlier race of the same fungus wiped out the previously dominant Gros Michel cultivar in the mid twentieth century. First detected in Southeast Asia in the 1990s, tropical race 4 has since spread to Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, and because it persists in soil indefinitely and has no effective chemical control, it is regarded as the single greatest threat to the global banana industry.