Help at Hand

Every year, around 30% of the global harvest is lost to pests and diseases. The worst affected are poor farmers in the developing world. A number of measures are available to help limit losses. Pesticides and fungicides are one kind of solution, but they can damage the environment and harm people's health and are often too costly for poor farmers. Modern varieties that resist pests and diseases offer another kind of solution, but planting large areas with genetically uniform resistant varieties provides ideal conditions for new strains of pests and diseases to evolve, threatening to overcome the crops' resistance after only a few seasons. In any case, smallholder farmers are often unable to get hold of the latest modern varieties, and most are too poor to buy them. Furthermore, modern varieties often perform badly in marginal areas, especially with little or no fertilizer or irrigation.

A farmer in Uganda tells a Bioversity researcher about the varieties of common beans she grows and their diseases.
Photo: T. Johns. Bioversity International.

Farmers in the developing world need sustainable solutions that require few inputs and are affordable and environmentally friendly. Devra Jarvis, senior scientist at Bioversity International, believes that sustainable and cost-effective solutions could lie in the diversity of traditional crops and varieties, a resource that smallholder farmers can easily access and use. That is the basis of the 6-year Bioversity project "Conservation and use of crop genetic diversity to control pests and disease in support of sustainable agriculture," funded by the United Nations Environment Programme-Global Environment Facility, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, with additional support from the Ford Foundation and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

A farmer in Morocco tells project partners from China, Ecuador and Uganda about the diseases that affect his field of faba beans.
Photo: Bioversity International.

The project will work in China, Ecuador, Morocco and Uganda with the aim of helping poor farmers to make the most of their local crop diversity to control pests and diseases. The approach is to integrate farmers' knowledge, beliefs and practices with advanced analysis of crop, pest and disease interactions. The first phase of the project was formally launched in November 2007 at a meeting of global partners in China.

Key staple crops are the focus in each country: banana, barley, common bean, faba bean, maize and rice. Bioversity will collaborate with a range of national and international partners, including the Users' Perspectives with Agricultural Research and Development of the International Potato Center, FAO, International Food Policy Research Institute, International Rice Research Institute, and several local universities and nongovernmental organizations.

Considerable evidence supports the project's approach to pest and disease management. Studies of advanced agricultural systems show that crop mixtures and rotations can reduce the damage caused by pests and diseases. Research also reveals that many farmers already use the diversity of traditional varieties, and mixtures of modern and traditional varieties, in this way. The benefits of the approach are clear. Not only is it affordable and environmentally sustainable, it also protects the diversity of the local agricultural ecosystem.

According to Jarvis, the project partners will identify systems in which farmers can reduce their vulnerability and losses by planting diverse varieties. A key starting point has been to develop a set of participatory tools to capture and understand farmers' knowledge and practices of using local crop varieties to manage pests and diseases, thereby finding solutions that suit local needs and environments. This adds a new dimension to work on pest and disease management, which has commonly focused on only three components: host, pathogen and environment.

"The project will ensure that the fourth critical component - the farmer - is also included," says Jarvis.

Participatory diagnostic tools are now available in English, Chinese, French and Spanish, with plans to translate them into Arabic well advanced. Many of the tools build on participatory techniques developed during Bioversity's global project on the in situ conservation of agricultural biodiversity.

The next challenge will be to develop guidelines for laboratory and field assessments that build on this knowledge. Trials in farmers' fields will assess the disease and pest resistance of traditional varieties, and trials at experimental stations will allow researchers to follow epidemics over time and observe impacts on yields.

The final goal is to augment farmers' options for fighting pests and diseases in a sustainable way.