Brazil has long had a well-established passion fruit industry with large-scale juice extraction plants. The purple passion fruit is there preferred for consuming fresh; the yellow for juice processing and the making of preserves.
In Australia, the purple passion fruit was flourishing and partially naturalized in coastal areas of Queensland before 1900. Its cultivation, especially on abandoned banana plantations, attained great importance and the crop was considered relatively disease-free and easily managed. Then, about 1943, a widespread invasion of Fusarium wilt killed the vines and forced the undertaking of research to find fungus-resistant substitutes. It was discovered that the neglected yellow passion fruit is both wilt-and nematode-resistant and does not sucker from the roots. It was adopted as a rootstock and plants propagated by grafting were soon made available to planters in Queensland and northern New South Wales (Julia F. Morton& Miami, FL., 1987).