First published in Fruit Gardener Magazine
In a tiny tropical nation, called the Republic of Maldives, all the lime trees were dying with shockingly rapidity and nobody knew why. Since limes formed an essential part of this nation's cuisine, and therefore its heritage, losing them was considered a disaster. Another, more ancient tragedy plagued the Maldive people,.too. Far too many young women were still dying in childbirth. When its government-invited American plant pathologist and virologist Chester Roistacher to investigate the reason for the dying trees, he discovered, with his eyes and heart as well as intellect, that both tragedies shared a root cause.
The Republic of Maldives is a scattering of tiny islands among the atolls and reefs in the Indian Ocean between the tip of India, Sri Lanka and the equator. North of their section of the Indian Ocean lies the Arabian sea, narrowing at its northwestern end into the Persian Gulf. On a map, the eastern shore of Saudi Arabia looks to be little more than a yacht-ride distant.
Maldivians are racially a mixture of Indian and Polynesian. Since not one speck of land in the entire country reaches more than six feet above sea level, the educated among them worry about global warming and Arctic glaciers melting. The Maldivian food staples have always been rice, tuna, onions and limes from the trees culviated on every inhabited island. Limes are the Maldivians' most important fruit, used as a condiment in all the traditional dishes.
But the lime trees are dying. The fruit has become so scarce that what used to cost half a cent apiece now brings twenty cents. In a society that could be described as "forth world," where the average yearly income is equivalent to only a few hundred American dollars, few can now afford this most important fruit. As a result, Maldivians are losing part of their heritage. The dying lime trees are everywhere, on almost every island, their branches withering, dropping leaves and turning into firewood.
This was the situation Dr. Roistacher encountered. He had been in Rome at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Society of the United Nations when he was briefed on the problem, and he agreed to investigate. Almost immediately, he and his wife flew to the Maldives. From the air, all he could see was lots of green surrounded by coral atolls and blue ocean. The landing strip, on its own island, was a rather alarming aspproach, The very short runway left almost no room for error. From a few hundred feet away, as he sat on his ferry to the main island, his jet looked to him as if it were floating on the water.
A short boat ride took him and his wife to Male, an island one square mile in size holding a population of 70-80,000 people. It was almost another world to them. Although Male is the Republic's capital, it has no pavement, no cars, only bicycles and foot power for transportation. Its finest building is a beautiful mosque, gift from a wealthier Moslem neighbor. The climate is hot and muggy, leprosy still occurs, and bullet holes from a past revolution riddle many of the walls.
But Male is definitelynot a hell-hole. It and the other Maldive islands have white beaches that glisten in the sun, palm trees, lots of green, and the people mix that coral sand with mortar to make lovely white buildings. Male also used to hold 200 lime trees. By the time Dr. Roistacher arrived, only seven to ten trees remained, and they were dying. The Director of Agriculture pointed out one of them and opined that the cause was a root disease. Dr. Roistacher took a closer look. He saw that the leaves and bark had lesions that resembled a familiar disease called canker, but canker doesn't usually kill off an infected plant as quickly as these trees were dying. Dr. Roistacher explored nearby islands in the Male atoll and saw that there, too, most of the trees were dead and the rest in mortal decline.
Although most of the Maldive islands are out of bounds to foreigners, a worried government allowed him access to all of them. To get to these others, he and his wife traveled over water. On one of these treks, he met some other invited governmental guests--Save the Children Foundation workers, mostly European, who were there to teach sanitation methods and concepts to the Maldivian women in an effort to slow the terrible childbirth-related death rate. At the time, he made none of the connections that would dawn on him later.
Dr. Roistacher inspected the water system. Although rainfall is abundant, he found that the water turns salty five feet below the surface. Sanitation problems are serious. On the outer islands, people suffer from cholera and water contamination.
He found no healthy trees on the other islands he first visited. They all showed symptoms of nutrient deficiency that were serious but did not appear life-threatening in themselves. The people were desperately trying to grow lime seedlings,but without much luck. Dr. Roistacher also found certain insect problems, but nothing wrong with the roots. However, pustules and deep lesions in the bark--the same symptoms he had noticed on the dying trees on Male--led him once again to suspect canker, although he and other scientist who later saw his samples and pictures could hardly believe that canker lesions could cut so deep, causing such swift deterioration and death to the trees. On Male, he had also seen canker lesions on the fruit itself.
The Republic of Maldives is devoutly Islamic. To gain income from tourism without exposing their people to unwelcome outside influences, the government had vacated one entire island to build a tourist resort. The warm, balmy climate is a special lure for Swedes, Danes and Germans, especially in winter, and the resort is popular. The natives do not live there.
During a one-day excursion to that tourist island, Dr. Roistacher came across two healthy lime trees, the only healthy ones he had seen so far in the entire Maldivian archipelago. Although both trees suffered from the usual bug infestations he had noticed everywhere else, they showed no signs of the deep lesions so typical of lime trees on all the other islands he had thus far visited.
Still searching for answers, Dr. Roistacher took a trip to islands even farther out. These, almost touching the equator, were hot and humid but pristine. Because of the very shallow water, travelers needed to get from one to another by row boat. Maldivians are great boat builders, which is how their ancestors got there in the first place.
Way out here, living conditions were even more primitive than on Male. In the house where the Roistachers stayed during one of these visits, the toilet pit and water well were only about ten feet from one another. Since cholera was known to exist locally, he and his wife took the precaution of keeping their lips tightly closed when they bathed by means of dumping buckets of water over one another.
Here, too, the lime trees were dying, and on one of these outer islands, Dr. Roistacher finally figured out the problem, or so he then believed: classical Asian canker, the most virulent form of the disease. During his investigations, he had talked to each and every island chief, which is something the Minister of Agriculture never did. Every one of those men told him the same story. There had always been the insect problems. The brown spots and lesions were a new development and associated with the death of trees.
His diagnosis turned out to be part of, but not the entire problem. During this first first visit to the Maldives, he saw almost no dead branch wood because the locals would cut them off and use them as firewood. Dr. Roistacher with his wife flew back to Washington D.C., taking fruit, bark and twig samples with him to consult an expert in canker.
They discussed the climate and agreed upon the reason for the disease. The Maldive climate, very hot and rainy, serves as a perfect incubator for noxious micro-organisms. It also experiences, at times, high velocity winds that can spread bacteria from island to island. This, Dr. Roistacher believed, was the cause, the sole cause of the lime trees dying, and he wrote a paper, published in a scientific journal, that stated his conclusions. A few years later.....
He returned to the Maldives. He had been notified of a new outbreak of the disease on one of the few islands that had been free of it before. Here, as elsewhere, he found lesions on the fruit of 120 dying lime trees. However, the disease had not progressed as far as it had on the islands visited earlier.
This difference allowed him a glimpse of the earlier stages. For the first time, he saw how the twigs had lost their bark, a process called "girdling." He also saw leaves all over the ground. Suddenly, Dr. Roistacher had an insight as to what really was causing the swift devastation to the Maldive lime trees.
The twig girdling was not due to the Asian canker disease but to bad sun-scald. It was this scald that had killed the trees so quickly, a secondary reaction that occured when the leaves fell, rains came, then hot tropical sun blansted the unshaded bark. Although canker was the basic problem, and wouild have entually killed these trees, the ;unusually swift decline and death found in the Maldive limes was due to sun scald.
He also now realized, with rapidly expanding insight, that wind was not the only vector. People would walk in the rain over the fallen leaves. Children would wade in the puddles, and all of this activity splashed bacterial spores onto their feet which then carried the disease from one house to another.
It was also a custom among Maldivians to carry fruit from one island to another. Thereby infection spread. The disease had originally come on fruit from India or Sri Lanka, brought back to the islands on the motorized boats that had made travel to the mainland so much easier these days. Thesimple people of this developing country have no concept of quarantine or bacterial spreading. What had killed legions of their women in childbirth--a lack of awareness of the basic concepts of sanitation--was also killing their lime trees.
" Alice Ramirez 1994
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