A disease that destroys banana trees known as Panama Disease has now been widely affecting the largest species of banana on Earth and a recent research study has concluded that the banana will disappear from the planet in only a few short years.

A recent study published in PLOS Pathogens has found that the Cavendish banana, which provides the world with 99 percent of its bananas, will soon be extinct. Scientists state that there is no cure for the disease and that the world’s bananas are all being attacked by what’s known as Tropical Race 4 which is a raging and more deadly mutation of the Panama Disease, according to The Washington Post.

This is the same deadly strain that had completely wiped out the Gros Michel type of banana in the middle of the 2oth Century. The Cavendish was developed to replace the extinct Gros Michel and it now looks as if this type, too, will go the way of the Gros Michel. Right now, the Tropical Race 4 is destroying bananas everywhere in the world except for South America. The fungus has not reached there yet but scientists conclude that it not a matter of if it makes it to South America but when it will get there. Right now, South America is the world’s largest producer of bananas.

The main reason that the banana will become extinct is because all modern day bananas are clones of one another. There is no longer any variety or strains that might develop a resistance to certain diseases. While this makes for a more profitable business for Dole and Chiquita, it makes their bananas unduly vulnerable to an attack by such a virulent disease as Tropical Race 4.

By now moving the world toward just one variety of banana, fruit growers have raise the inevitability of their crop becoming entirely extinct. The same thing happened during Ireland’s great potato famine in 1846. Irish farmers had all decided to grow jut one variety of potato. With no other varieties to defend against disease and still thrive, Ireland lost a potato crop that killed many thousand and displaced many more.