MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombia declares banana production farm in quarantine due to fear of fungus

The fungus, known as 'Panama disease,' only affects the plant and not the fruit, so it allegedly bears no risk to human health.

A Colombian banana production farm near the Venezuelan border has been declared under quarantine after the possible outbreak of a lethal fungus has been detected, local authorities acknowledged Monday.

”What we are doing is to contain the (possible) presence of the fungus in those properties, controlling the mobilisation, fumigating and disinfecting and thus preventing it from reaching the rest of the national territory,” said Agriculture Minister Andrés Valencia in Bogotá.

The tropical fusarium race 4 (Foct R4T) can contaminate crop fields for more than 30 years. The fungus, which can be introduced by humans into crops, has devastated the industry in countries in Asia and Africa.

The Colombian government sent samples of the infected crops abroad to establish if it is the pest, said Deyanira Barrero, manager of the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA).

“We are waiting for the results of this lab in the Netherlands for the first week of August,” she explained.

In the meantime, the alert is focused exclusively on some 150 hectares of a farm in the department of La Guajira, in the extreme north of Colombia and bordering Venezuela. The production has already been destroyed and the farm is in quarantine.

Colombia was the world's sixth banana exporter in 2018 according to the Ministry of Agriculture. No sale restrictions have yet been imposed in fear of the fungus, authorities revealed.

Health authorities are investigating whether the fungus could be introduced by workers from Venezuela, where according to the government there is no information on phytosanitary controls in the midst of the severe crisis that hits that country.

“The Venezuelan migration has brought several difficulties from the sanitary and phytosanitary point of view,” added Valencia, recalling the case of foot-and-mouth disease that affected cattle from that country in 2018.

The minister also said that the fungus, known as 'Panama disease,' only affects the plant and not the fruit, so it allegedly bears no risk to human health.

The International Regional Organization for Agricultural Health (Oirsa) issued an alert to prevent the advance of the destructive wilt disease in Central America, it was reported.

Colombia, where some 917,000 people live off the banana crop, exported more than two million tons in 2018.