Too much bunchy, too little money

LIHU’E- A plan to wipe out more than 3 million diseased banana trees on Kaua’i apparently will be replaced by a more modest attempt to combat banana bunchy top virus.

State Department of Agriculture officials said Wednesday that a program combining chemicals with public education to take out infected trees would be more affordable and stand a better chance of success.

Before all but scrapping it, the officials spent most of a three-hour meeting with 20 banana growers discussing a proposed eradication of the virus. The massive project could cost $5 million and take more than three years to destroy all banana trees—an estimated 3.5 million—on every farm and in every back yard and gulch spanning 250 square miles in the Kapa’a-Wailua Homesteads, Kalihiwai-Kilauea and Hanalei areas.

While some growers support the plan, none argued with the opinion of Lyle Wong, head of the department’s plant industry division, that the project would be too cumbersome and expensive.

“It will fail miserably,” Wong said. He predicted that, among other problems, some property owners would resist the department’s legal authority to kill their trees with herbicides.

A scaled-down program for controlling the virus and trying to eliminate it with a more low-key approach would cost approximately $150,000, an amount far easier to get than the millions that would require approval of the Legislature, officials said.

“We can get better return for the dollar instead of going after every (banana) plant,” Wong said.

A timeline for starting the campaign hasn’t been set. But already, the Department of Agriculture has banned any moving of diseased banana plants around Kaua’i. Infractions are punishable by fines of $100 to $10,000.

Since first appearing on Kaua’i in the Kilaueau area in 1997, the banana bunchy top virus has threatened the island’s banana-growing industry. The disease is spread by an aphid that gets around on the wind and when infected plants are moved. While bananas are safe to eat, the trees that sprout them become stunted or don’t grow at all because of the virus.

The virus is recognizable through the bunchy appearance and yellowed edges of young leaves and streaking in older leaves.

In 1998, 500,000 pounds of bananas with a farm value of $212,000 were grown commercially on Kaua’i. In all of Hawaii that year, the industry produced 21 million pounds of bananas worth $7.3 million.

The banana virus problem is statewide. Growers and state agriculture officials say better enforcement of quarantines is needed to prevent infected banana plants from being shipped between islands. Airlines cooperate with inspections, but people can still “smuggle” plants in sealed packages, said Larry Nakahara, a plant pest control chief for the Department of Agriculture.

That uncontrollable “human factor,” as one grower put it, is a major reason why an all-out eradication program is too hard. Without everyone’s cooperation with quarantines and spraying of diseased banana trees, the virus can keep coming back, growers noted.

Besides Kaua’i, the virus is well-entrenched on O’ahu and Kona. The latter is in the midst of an eradication program that, at 10 square miles and a cost of $10,000-plus, is much smaller than the one proposed for Kaua’i.

If an eradication program was launched here, an alternative could be a biocontrol agent. That’s technical talk for an aphid-eating bug, such as the ladybird bettle from Taiwan. But officials would have to be careful that the beetles only “chomped” on aphids and not useful insects, Wong said.

Editor Pat Jenkins can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 227).