300,000+ African farmers overcome banana Xanthomonas wilt using Alliance-developed single diseased stem removal with other measures.

Blomme, G.; Ocimati, W.; Kikulwe, E.; Johnson, V. (2025) 300, 000+ African farmers overcome banana Xanthomonas wilt using Alliance-developed single diseased stem removal with other measures. Study #AFR - 2401. Rome (Italy): Bioversity International; Cali (Colombia): CIAT. 6 p.

An Alliance partnership has finalized a bundle of highly effective, low-cost, and user-friendly banana Xanthomonas wilt disease (BXW) control technologies including Single Diseased Stem Removal (SDSR), to protect East and Central Africa’s multibillion dollar banana production and >3 million farmers’ livelihoods across the region [1]. SDSR has been adopted by > 300,000 banana farmers on >100,000 ha of bananas in Burundi, eastern DR Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, providing 96% recovery in control costs and reducing BXW incidence to below 1% within 10 months, compared to traditional methods [2,3,4,5].