Sustaining smallholder banana production in Banana Bunchy Top Disease endemic landscapes

Banana bunchy top virus continues to threaten smallholder livelihoods and food security across sub-Saharan Africa. While clean-seed programmes are widely promoted, their long-term effectiveness is often compromised by rapid reinfection in endemic landscapes. Here we show an integrated framework combining spatially explicit, stochastic epidemiological modelling with additional cost–benefit analysis and socio-behavioural data to evaluate strategies for stabilising production. Our results demonstrate that frequent monthly inspections and accurate symptom detection are essential for disease suppression. Our analysis reveals that prioritizing diagnostic competence as an economic asset is necessary, since improving detection probability can more than double farmer net revenue under realistic market conditions. Socio-behavioural findings further confirm that a farmer's ability to correctly recognise symptoms is the strongest predictor of roguing adoption, far outweighing demographic characteristics. These results provide quantifiable guidance for disease management and highlight that effective banana bunchy top virus management through eradication to replace infected plants hinges on farmers' capacity to identify infected plants. Therefore, disease management strategies based on clean seed interventions should also emphasize farmers' disease identification skills. This also enhances local surveillance capabilities, contributes to the resilience of informal seed systems, and safeguards banana production and household food security.