Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
figure 2.3.UnitedFruitCompanypasturesnearTela(1920s).UnitedFruitCompany
Photograph Collection. Baker Library, Harvard Business School.
surveyors detected the disease on at least two farms in its Tela Division.
65
Three years later, a U.S. ocial in La Ceiba reported on the ''appearance
of a plant disease in the nature of a blight which has attacked some of
the best plantations.''
66
In 1922, employees of the Truxillo Railroad Com-
pany detected the disease in Colón.
67
By that point, word must have been
spreading quickly along the Costa Norte: lamatamuerta,or Panama dis-
ease, was invading export banana farms.
The disease took its name from the place where it was first widely
observed: banana growers on the Atlantic coast of Panama reported wilt-
like symptoms as early as the 1890s.
68
Within a decade, the disease was
causing serious problems on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica.
69
By the
time growers first noticed Panama disease in Honduras, major outbreaks
had already occurred in Surinam (1906), Cuba (1908), Trinidad (1909),
Puerto Rico (1910), and Jamaica (1911).
70
In 1910, U.S. researcher Erwin F.
Smith isolated a fungus on diseased banana tissues from Cuba that he
named Fusarium cubense.
71
However, that same year, a U.S. Department
of Agriculture scientist in Panama suggested that the pathogen was a bac-
teria.
72
Scientists continued to disagree about the identityof the pathogen
until 1919 when E. W. Brandes demonstrated that Fusarium oxysporum f.
cubense could produce all of the characteristic symptoms of the disease
