PlantVillage转发了
For over a decade BBTV has been spreading throughout Tanzania, with no action being taken to actually stop the spread. PlantVillage is prone to action. It's so impressive to see how fast they move and the scope of their impact.
Huck Chair in Global Food Security at Penn State University and Director of USAID Innovation Lab on Current and Emerging Threats to Crops, Founder of PlantVillage & PlantVillage+
If you have been following along you know there is a major threat to East African banana production called Banana Bunchy Top Disease caused by Banana Bunchy Top Virus. It is vectored by an aphid and also spread by farmers sharing infected planting material (banana is clonal so a good way to plant is get some material from neighbors). As part of large investment by USAID Tanzania to our Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Current and Emerging Threats to Crops (CETC IL) we are working with Maua Mazuri which is a company in Tanzania producing viral free plantlets. In our USAID Innovation Lab our model is SOS (Surveillance, Outreach and Solutions). And we want to test if we can actually deploy the Solution at scale. Can we show that banana production need not collapse as it did in Malawi (we are also scaling up there to bring back the industry and working in Uganda and Zambia on BBTV to prevent it exploding there). We have already planted 45,000 plantlets in late 2023/ early 2024 but now we are trying to plant 118,961 with 9 weeks left. We estimate we have to do around 12,000/week! (they are Mzuzu, Grand Nain and Taraban for you ?? experts) Here are some pictures from the excellent team at work today. This is all to show that we can implement solutions and provide jobs for young people and farmers at the same time. And via a private sector lens by Maua Mazuri and PlantVillage+ we can ensure sustainability, reducing pressure on the public purse. And thanks to an investment by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we will continue our AI and cloud work to chart how well we do so we can push back against this disease in other places. And not just stop with BBTV but also tackle other threats *TR4 (the fungus Fusarium odoratissimum that was called Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense Tropical race 4) * Black and Yellow Sigatoka (Mycosphaerella spp) *Nematodes * climate change etc etc We have solutions. Lets get planting! ??
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