Palm | Kelapa Sawit

26th August, 2009

Source Sunday Monitor 31.05.09

Kampala: The government has raised its crop disease surveillance levels in the western Ugandan border districts after a new banana viral disease, the banana bunchy top virus, was reported to have attacked farms in neighbouring Rwanda.
The Director for Crop Protection in the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr Opolot Okasaai, told Sunday Monitor that although two banana sucker samples which had been feared to be affected with the banana bunchy top virus had tested negative, the surveillance levels were raised in Ntungamo district and other border areas to stem a possible spread of the disease across the border.
The samples tested by the agriculture ministry were collected from Kanungu and Kisoro districts on the border with Rwanda, where many farmers are losing their crops to the virus, which is capable of causing up to 100 per cent yields loss under severe attack. The virus stops the banana from flowering and producing a bunch.
Dr Okasaai told Sunday Monitor on Thursday in Kampala that if the virus attacks, it will jeopardise some of the efforts to restore banana production after another disease, the Banana bacterial wilt, affected production of the crop in almost 60 districts in the country.
“[The test result] is negative for now. But our alertness is at its highest,” Dr Okasaai said, adding that the government was encouraging farmers, especially in the border districts, to report any suspicious and unusual banana plant growth.
So far, Rwanda, DR-Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and Hawaii have reported the disease, which has no cure or developed banana varieties to resist it. Dr Okasaai said the virus has no known cure so far, and that all available banana cultivars and varieties in the country were vulnerable to the attack.
An attack by the new banana virus would be a major blow to the $360 million (about Shs756 billion) banana industry, which recently saw nearly 90 per cent of farm yields wiped out by a banana bacterial wilt disease attack. Uganda has one of the highest per capita matooke consumption in the world at about 500kg.
Statistics from the National Agricultural Research Laboratories show that Matooke occupies 38 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, accounting for food security to over 12 million Ugandans. But in the last five years, production has sharply decreased due to numerous diseases and pest attacks.
Following the new threat, the government last year dispatched a team of Ugandan banana experts led by the Head of Banana Research Programme, Dr Wilberforce Tushemereirwe, to ascertain the threat.
Facts about banana bunchy top virus The virus is transmitted by insects called aphids. Unlike the banana wilt disease, the new virus is not mechanically transmitted by farm tools like pangas and hoes.
Dr David Talengera, a senior banana researcher at the National Agricultural Research Laboratories in Kawanda, said recently that the virus is known to stop the banana plants from flowering and producing a bunch. The leaves of the banana form a rough, bunchy-like structure pointing upwards, with no bunch forming.
He said the disease is also transmitted by planting materials when a parent stock produces a sucker that is transferred across distances for planting.
“We are discouraging this. We intend to develop guidelines on handling this disease,” Talengera said. Prof. Mateete Bekunda, a soils scholar at Makerere University said the rise in temperatures had made most parts of the country’s soils barren and habitable to numerous pests and parasites.

Posted By: Takudzwa Kufa