Coconut lethal yellowing may be a strange name, but it is unlike any disease I have seen. It attacks and destroys whole landscapes. A leafy canopy of coconut palms is a signature image of the tropics. Here in Côte d’Ivoire (once called the Ivory Coast), whole groves of coconut have died. The leaves turn yellow and fall off, leaving nothing behind but a decapitated trunk. The stately palms become a ghastly forest of telephone poles.

In the village of Badadon, people explained that they were losing their livelihood. They depend on coconuts, growing them to sell for their oil. But many coconut palms in the community are turning yellow, and will all be dead in a few months. The farmers are able to grow some cassava between the palms, but coconuts thrive on sandy, salty soil where few other plants will live.

A video made in Côte d’Ivoire and available in various local languages is addressing the issue of how to grow cassava on sandy coastal soils: see Growing cassava on poor soils).

The coconut lethal yellowing disease arrived in neighboring Ghana in 1932, although for some reason it has recently spread much faster in West Africa. Similar diseases have been killing coconuts in the Caribbean and in East Africa.

The cause is a strange organism called a phytoplasma, which is a bacterial without a cell wall. It acts a bit like a virus, with deadly effect. Phytoplasmas are carried from plant to plant by sucking insects, and they also live in various alternative hosts, such as the weedy plants between the palms.

I have been watching plant pathologists bore into coconut trunks with carpenters’ drills, collecting sawdust to isolate the phytoplasma and cultivate it, to reconfirm the diagnosis and learn more about the cause of the diseases.

It’s frustrating because there is no cure for the disease. There is still basic research to be done such as finding the exact insect vector and the alternate plant hosts.

But even at an early stage, the scientists are sharing what they do know with farmers. In the village of Badadon people from the university in Abidjan and other institutions are explaining that lethal yellowing is spread by a microbe, and how the symptoms progress. Meanwhile the scientists are searching for resistant coconut varieties and will soon start working with the communities, to find a solution. They are going to try fertilizer trials, to see if healthier soil offers a solution.

Farmers and scientists have perhaps five years to save the coconut palms of Côte d’Ivoire.

With Yaima Arrocha, Hortense Atta Diallo and Eric Boa in Côte d’Ivoire.

Other names: In Ghana, coconut lethal yellowing is called Cape Saint Paul’s disease.

In Côte d’Ivoire it is called jaunissement mortel du cocotier.