How Global Collaboration Can Prevent Plant Disease Pandemics in Africa
CGIAR News; March 21, 2022
Emerging plant diseases threaten Africa's food security, but international scientific collaboration can help to turn these menaces around.
Looking out across a crop nursery filled with diseased plants, you’d be forgiven for thinking there is something wrong.
However, these are no ordinary nurseries – they are “disease nurseries” filled with crop samples and breeding lines gathered from around the world, and they play a vital role in helping scientists to identify varieties that can withstand a disease outbreak.
With the impact of climate change accelerating the spread of plant diseases and putting at least 40% of global crop production at risk, preventing a plant pandemic is as essential as vaccinating the world against Covid-19 and requires even more ongoing international cooperation to do so.
As demonstrated during the Covid-19 pandemic, sharing information about disease spread, particularly of new and emerging variants, has been critical to managing the virus impact, and it is no different with crops.
By sharing plant material around the world, researchers can expose multiple varieties to prevalent diseases in the same, controlled location, allowing them to select and recommend the resilient varieties to national breeding programmes.
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