Explainable concern in professional circles has been caused by media advertisements promoting the sale of seedlings imported into the country supposedly tolerant to Fusarium TR4 (Panama disease), without faithfully following official protocols, putting our main agricultural asset at risk. , which coincides with the news that this terrible disease has spread to neighboring Peru. In accordance with the commitment between the importing company Galitec and Iniap, it was necessary to subject them to tests in experiments that were to be carried out in several production areas of the country, as environmental protection schemes change and affect the response of plants to diseases. They were carried out in only two places, in Santa Elena and Quevedo, not enough to represent the Ecuadorian banana sector and its climatic diversity, with a viral infection observed in one of them, which is a devastating pathology as serious or more serious than the one it is intended to prevent..

German cooperation to strengthen the banana sector in the Andean Community against Fusarium plague

During the administration of the Minister of Agriculture, Pedro Álava, in the same regime, the import for research of 4,600 plants of the Formosana 218 variety was approved, with a previous inspection of the laboratory and crops in South Africa, where this disease has not been recorded, meets the conditions for its nationalization, is the subject of scrupulous analysis, with strict scientific rigor, under the responsibility of Iniap, including quarantines and checking in the fields for adaptation for 40 months without supervision, in addition to checking the quality of the fruit, resistance to damage in the transatlantic journey, ripening conditions, days of persistence and fundamental adaptation to local practices and peculiarities , knowing that this type of musacea becomes sensitive to TR4 after two or three cycles, requiring new, successive and expensive plantings, losing the social connotation of this plantation, making them elitist, small growers disappear.

Banana growers expect more action after the export control system is cleared

The commercial ease is of such magnitude that it is proposed to turn Ecuador into a center for the worldwide expansion and distribution of this variety, without opening the possibility for other species also approved as tolerant by another company authorized to do so. Not even the threat that neighbors Colombia and Peru already have justifies the rush, the violation of time and the necessary determination of national convenience before taking access to a million seedlings, enough to convert 600 hectares, which would replace the current ones, because new ones are prohibited by legal authority.

The banana cluster requires security in export and not to damage the image of the industry

The measure must be suspended until the new government analyzes it in depth, guaranteeing the sustainability of the banana, which accredits a major contribution to the economy, freeing it from imminent danger. The distribution of specimens that behave best in the face of terrible evil should be done only after all questions have been answered. Failure would be to put the engine of national life on a cliff. History will judge those who do not assume the obligation to protect this precious agricultural asset. (OR)