The control of transboundary plant diseases and the problem of the public good: Lessons from Fusarium wilt in banana

ABSTRACT

Many plant diseases and pests cannot be controlled on-farm as they spread from one field or region to another. This opens up a series of interconnected social, political, and economic questions besides the common technical questions about the spread, impact and management of the disease or pest. A new genotype of the soil-born fungus Fusarium, called Tropical Race 4, is extremely virulent, widely destroying banana crops destined for domestic and international markets, and spreading rapidly in Southeast Asia and recently to other countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. It threatens both staple food production and the export of bananas. The international research and policy-making communities on bananas have been alarmed and are calling for concerted action to control this disease. This paper supports the idea that Fusarium wilt control has to be regarded as a public good but also finds that the public good is being conceptualized in divergent ways. It raises the question as to what gaps exist in the current understanding of providing that public good. The paper identifies a set of key problems, including the problem of anticipation by governments, a neglect of histories of political economic oppositions in the banana sector, the strictures of sovereignty-thinking in multilateral responses, and the aversion that neo-liberal models of governance develop to the public good.

KEYWORD:

• Public action
• sociology of agricultural pest management
• regulation
• disease governance
• anticipation

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their critical reading and helpful comments. We also thank Gert Kema and our colleagues at the Rural Sociology group of Wageningen University, in particular, Han Wiskerke and Anna Roodhof, for commenting on earlier versions of this article. All remaining errors are those of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ At the time of writing, Foc TR4 infestation had been confirmed in Taiwan, mainland China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Australia, Jordan, Oman, Mozambique, Pakistan and Lebanon (Ordoñez et al., 2015, 2018), Vietnam (Hung et al., 2018), Laos (Chittarath et al., 2018), Israel (Maymon et al., 2018), India (Damodaran et al., 2019), Colombia (García-Bastidas et al., 2020), Peru (Acuña et al., 2021), and the Island of Mayotte (Aguayo et al., 2021).

² Kallhoff (2014) also provides a social justice argument for reconsidering the technical definition of public goods that mostly informs calls for substituting them by private goods. She argues that the production of public goods builds solidarity, promotes connectivity in communities, and strengthens a shared sense of citizenship. As this is not a prime goal for, nor outcome of Fusarium wilt control, other public goods would probably serve better such functions; we will not discuss this further.

³ Brooks (2011) analyses how reframing the role of CGIAR as a public good provider (cf. Dalrymple, 2008), was not just a discursive strategy to attract new research money, for example from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but also reinforced generic technology strategies based on “silver bullet” expectations, such as singling out genetic improvement as main strategy, to the detriment of more site-specific approaches based on a recognition of diversity.

⁴ In their effort to develop frameworks for science that move beyond distinctions like public/private Stengel et al. (2009) follow Callon (1994), arguing that “public good science should not be based on ideas of insulation or protection from the market but, alternatively, on ideas of ensuring and promoting diversity in a science that is diversely networked with an appropriately democratic diversity of social articulations of needs, imagined ends of knowledge, ‘stakeholders’, and interpreters” (p. 296). Callon (1994) introduces three normative notions to decide about the publicness of research: freedom of association, freedom of extension, and fight against irreversibility. Taking examples from Fusarium wilt control these conditions can be explained as follows. Freedom of association refers to the absence of obstacles to connect with external technologies or knowledge partners. Examples of obstacles are patents, publication restrictions or control on the selection of research partners. The circulation of materials, creative ideas and techniques should be amplified. Include farmers or environmental movements in the network and one gets other research questions and statements. Freedom of extension means that Fusarium wilt researchers must have the means to create technical compatibility with other situations and to adapt production to expectations. This means building international connections for future experimentation and adaptation. The third notion —freedom of irreversibility— however, draws attention to the likelihood of extended networks simply perpetuating themselves and neglecting alternative potential opportunities. Science becomes private science and reduces variety. To fight irreversibility, emergent or new collectives that seek other solutions should be supported. These concepts may help to reflect on divergent proposals through which researchers and funding agencies seek solutions to Fusarium wilt. Although these three notions add sociological and anthropological insights to the economic definition of public goods, they seem to celebrate diversity and, consequently, provide little clues on what to decide about different, clashing technological options or the distribution of resources over different, competing research trajectories.

⁵ The implication of a weakest-link expectation would be that it is a prerequisite to involve all relevant actors in participating, developing or using the public good, while a best-shot expectation would find it less urgent to include all actors.

⁶ Desai (2003, p. 72) discusses the “Samuelson fiction of pure nonexcludable goods”. “There are few goods like that, and the allocation of public funds for them is often the least difficult problem. Most public goods are excludable and have externalities but are genuinely beneficial to many people. They are also rivalrous in the sense that one has to choose among them as well as determine the quantity and quality of the provision of those chosen”.

⁷ Division managers at that time were not trained agronomists. In that period more than 60% of UFCo’s trade was sourced from local planters, thus not from UFCo’s own plantations; by 1930 75% was sourced from UFCo’s own plantations.

⁸ Until then, treatments – mostly ineffective – differed between UFCo’s plantations (adding lime, digging out infected rhizomes and liming around them, burning or bleaching disease areas, mulching or adding manure) as the company hardly engaged in supervision of agricultural practices.

⁹ As late as 1962, Stover reproduces this view in his review published in 1962 (p.104), around the time that even UFCo was giving up Gros Michel and shifted to Cavendish.

¹⁰ For reviews of biotechnology research in banana in different periods, see INIBAP (1993), Crouch et al. (1998), Sági et al. (1998), Ortiz and Swennen (2014), Zorrilla-Fontanesi et al. (2020), and Kema et al. (2021).

¹¹ Is not yet exactly clear what happens at the genomic level in somaclonal variation: it has been suggested that stable genetic change has not been introduced but only some type of epigenetic modification (a heritable change that does not affect the DNA sequence but results in a change in gene expression) (Sorensen in www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE7mmCYeIs8).

¹² This does not mean, however, that such competition and confrontation hampers innovation: instead it may amplify the number of options and stimulate inventive research (Richards, 2004). Over time, competing strategies may be framed as complementary (e.g. Staver et al., 2020).

¹³ Aguilar Morán (2013) suggests that crossbreeding will increase the genetic diversity, while an eventual successful transgenic Cavendish would again make the banana industry dependent on a single clone.

¹⁴ Reclaiming new land for banana has led to a growth in banana production in Mindanao in the 2010s, in a time that growers increasingly face damage from Fusarium wilt. Hence, national production figures have not been a good indication of the severity of the epidemic. The possibility for relocation can be considered an expression of the power of companies vis-à-vis land reform cooperatives and small farmers who cannot move when Fusarium wilt damages their plantations (de la Cruz & Jansen, 2018). The development of Fusarium detection tools has much less value for smallholders who cannot shift their plantations than for large companies who have to decide about where to start a new plantation.

¹⁵ However, a situation with intensive smallholder cultivation on contiguous plots is still to be seen as a monoculture from an epidemiological perspective.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Interdisciplinary Research and Education Fund (INREF) of Wageningen University .