Banana Emergency Strikes Costa Rica – ThinkProgress Details Alert sent: No Sites: PH Publish date: Thu 2013-Dec-12 Author: Joanna M. Foster Channel: Pests/diseases Text (summary): A “banana emergency” sounds almost comic, but it’s anything but funny when bananas are your staple food source and income, and the emergency is an insect infestation that threatens to destroy that all-important crop. That’s exactly the situation in Costa Rica, where on Tuesday, officials from the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry’s State Phytosanitary Services, (SFE) issued a statement declaring a national crop emergency for bananas. In 2012, Costa Rica exported more than 1.2 million tons of fresh bananas worth $815 million according to the Foreign Trade Promotion office. This year’s crop could be substantially less thanks to an outbreak of scale insects and mealybugs. Currently the pests have spread across 24,000 hectares of plantations in the country’s Atlantic region. Read more: thinkprogress.org [English Locations Location Coordinates Zoom Relevance Show on map Costa Rica, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil 23.4167°S 54.65°W 0.958 Eastern Province, Sri Lanka 6.776°N 81.7076°E 0.319 Jordan, Western Visayas, Philippines 10.6584°N 122.596°E 0.303 Discovery Discoveries: Discovery method: Robot discovered URL: Original language: English Original title: Banana Emergency Strikes Costa Rica – ThinkProgress Original text (summary): A “banana emergency” sounds almost comic, but it’s anything but funny when bananas are your staple food source and income, and the emergency is an insect infestation that threatens to destroy that all-important crop. That’s exactly the situation in Costa Rica, where on Tuesday, officials from the Agriculture and Livestock Ministry’s State Phytosanitary Services, (SFE) issued a statement declaring a national crop emergency for bananas. In 2012, Costa Rica exported more than 1.2 million tons of fresh bananas worth $815 million according to the Foreign Trade Promotion office. This year’s crop could be substantially less thanks to an outbreak of scale insects and mealybugs. Currently the pests have spread across 24,000 hectares of plantations in the country’s Atlantic region.
