**3.2 History in Brazil**

The FY disease first appeared in Brazil in 1974, with sporadic occurrences in a field established in 1967 near Benevides, a city in the Pará State [8, 12]. The disease progressed slowly in the following years, from 25 symptomatic plants in 1978 to 125 in 1981. In 1984, ten years after the first report, the number of plants diagnosed with FY was 465 [11]. In the first ten years after its first appearance, the disease progressed in a linear model, and the numbers of affected plants remained more or less the same per unit of time. This mode of progress indicated that the contamination did not occur from plant to plant. However, the numbers of affected plants rose to 9,968 in 1986 and 32,673 in 1987, starting a period of exponential increase [11]. In the first two decades after its first occurrence in Brazil, approximately 100 thousand oil palm trees died from this disease, resulting in the loss of entire plantations [11, 40].

Roguing was then put in place to maintain the source of the inoculum of a possible pathogen to a minimum, eliminating all plants showing symptoms up to one month after the discovery [40, 41]. The oil palm industry promoted training on the fast and precise recognition of FY symptoms to guarantee the effectiveness of this phytosanitary measure [42]. Despite it, the disease kept on occurring in plants between the 15th and the 16th year after planting, making FY one of the main problems of this crop in Brazil. Not surprisingly, this discouraged the expansion of oil palm cultivation in the affected regions [11]. As the inability to identify the causal agent and promote effective control of FY persists, the oil palm industry remains in a state of insecurity to expand in the regions affected by FY [42].
