Immunity and cross-fertilisation in the genus Saccharum

Most of the cultivated forms (clones) of the species Saccharum officinarum L. are more or less affected by diseases, some of which may thus influence the product that failure of the crop is the consequence. Consulting the worldliterature about Saccharum, one repeatedly finds that for certain varieties, cultivated in one or another country, calamities broke out, caused by diseases, by which further cultivation of that form was stopped in that country. Such reports are mentioned from Mauritius, Cuba, Hawaii, and we also know them from Java. Here however, cultivation was not given up by the Dutch, but by improving the cultivation they tried to escape the disastrous influence of the disease and to keep the variety. In the eighties the Black Cheribon cane, the chief sugarcane variety then cultivated in Java, was attacked by the sereh-disease, probably a bacterial disease, by which the product declined in such a way that owing to this and to the world constellation, a crisis arose for the Sugarcane industry in Java.