BBW is a highly contagious bacterial disease that kills the banana trees and renders its fruit inedible. Following its initial appearance in Uganda it spread to a total of 33 districts by 2005.
“The disease has been recorded for decades in Ethiopia on Ensete, a close relative of the banana,” Wafa Khoury, FAO programme and plant pathology officer told MediaGlobal. “It was recorded recently on banana in Ethiopia, but it was only when it was reported in Uganda in 2001 that it was seen to cause severe damage to the banana crop.”
Due to the high volume of trade and production of bananas in the region, “the disease spread very quickly in many districts of Uganda at a very high rate,” Khoury explained.
It affected the banana crop so severely in Uganda that production fell 65 to 80 percent since its detection. Additionally, the land used for banana farming and production dropped to 13 percent.
In an attempt to combat the worsening situation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and Uganda's Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries joined together to develop the Farmers Field Schools.
“The project basically improved the adoption and acceptance of farmer communities to the disease management practices recommended for disease control,” Khoury said.
At the field schools, farmers were educated on best practices for protecting healthy plants from infection and containing the disease in those plants already affected.
Practices recommended by the FAO for the farmers are as simple (and chemical-free) as planting clean seedlings, applying wood-ash to contain the disease, and removing male buds (an vulnerable area for infection) by hand rather than with a knife to prevent spreading bacteria from tree to tree.
Furthermore, the field schools teach methods for effectively disposing of effected plants. For this purpose, FAO recommends “wherever they see a diseased plant, they should remove it, cut all infected material, dig a pit and bury or heap them into a mound. It is better that they dig a trench around the mound to avoid runoff and further contamination from infection,” Khoury described.
Once the material in the mound has rotted, any infections sprouting from the material will have been killed. Field experience has also shown that this method (again a chemical free, green method) also leaves the soil viable for new plantings by the next year.
“The disease is now much under control at a national level, due to the collective effort of FAO's project together with the government's efforts, and several other research institutions and NGO's active in Uganda,” praised Khoury.
The field schools have been so successful that today the disease is believed to be over 75 percent contained nationwide in addition to reports that the practices learned have also increased to rates higher before BBW's detection.
BBW has since been detected in Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya affecting multiple banana species, but the outlook is anything but grim.
As a result of the project's success, “FAO is working on developing other projects similar to that in Uganda for some of the East African countries affected by the disease,” Khoury added.
Article published courtesy of MediaGlobal
