The Crop Crisis Control Project (C3P) worked in six East African countries (Uganda, Burundi, DR Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania) to stem the advance of BXW, a bacterial disease of banana that emerged after 2001. Bananas and plantains were (and still are) important commercial and food security crops in the region. All local banana and plantain varieties were susceptible to BXW. The project implementers and donors thought of the disease as an emergency. In response, the project proposed what seemed like an appropriate technology to clean planting material: macropropagation (to distinguish it from its rival, TC, which is micropropagation). To macropropagate a banana plant, the farmer takes a healthy banana corm, strips away the outer leaf sheaths, destroys the primary sprout, and then plants the corm in sterile, humid sawdust in a shaded nursery, after which axillary buds will sprout. Many farmers were taught the importance of using clean planting material, but macropropagation was too time-consuming and labor-intensive to meet all of the farmer demand for seed bananas. After the project ended, researchers (who were paying attention to farmers) learned of easier ways to manage BXW. Farmers observed that a wilting banana plant still produced at least some healthy suckers, which could be used as planting material. Suckers that looked healthy probably were healthy, and could be planted, eliminating the need for tedious macropropagation.