Comments on: Plant diseases in Forage productivity

By: Ewen Le Borgne

Ewen Le Borgne — Fri, 15 May 2015 11:12:02 +0000

(Late comment from Addis team)
The work on viruses and diseases relating to forges is very limited. Especially in countries such as Ethiopia it is literally lacking. The need to develop a diagnostic kit to better identify and mange viruses is vital.
One factor contributing to this work being limited is the fact that productivity of forages is very less – and less means high cost. The Lack of forages in the system is one of the factors that hasn’t been researched much.
The virus problem is a global problem. It will be good to pilot this research in countries where forages is widely available. Ethiopia is not a good choice for this project as the current focus on feed is the introduction of fodder.
Prioritization and targeting
We need to pay attention to diseases at the rollout stage of a forage project, for example we can take the experience of Napier grass vs smut disease particularly in Uganda and Western Kenya. If we don’t pay attention to diseases at the rollout stage – we might end up 10 years down the road thinking that the intervention is not as useful as we thought it would be.
A good way to go forward might be to strengthen the national systems, capacity building of the national systems, ensuring that the forage interventions are disease resistant at the time of introduction.
At times this might pose a kind of the ‘chicken or egg’ scenario where by one needs to assess if the problem of viruses emerge from the introduction of forages or the other way round.
The evolution of viruses is also a challenge by itself. Viruses emerge very rapidly at the same time evolving into different viruses which makes this research a starting point to look into the challenges.

By: alokigib

alokigib — Thu, 14 May 2015 11:37:57 +0000

In reply to Isabelle Baltenweck. Thank you Isabelle for your appreciation and comments.

By: Shirley Tarawali

Shirley Tarawali — Thu, 14 May 2015 09:32:26 +0000

I think we need to think ‘bigger/more strategically’ about this – things like:
– how to put together advanced crop disease diagnostics which would bring together a number of parts of ILRI and partners/CRPs
– how to have approaches that take account of the diversity of forages and thus, what would be the sort of more generic outputs that may be used not just in Ethiopia but beyond
– what are the systems and their evolution that would really benefit from this – in relation to say, livestock commodity demand and forages….

By: Isabelle Baltenweck

Isabelle Baltenweck — Thu, 14 May 2015 09:11:35 +0000

I can’t believe we haven’t yet worked on this.. can i put more than 1 Like?
I think that KALRO would be very interested in working with us on this