National disaster looms as... Lake Zone farmers lose entire cassava harvests to viral diseases

Two viral crop diseases the Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) and Brown Streak Disease (CBSD) - have decimated virtually entire harvests in the Lake zone regions, destroying an estimated 90 percent of the crop last year, according to farmers and their leaders.

 

Cassava  literally forms the Lake zone’s underground food strategic reserve, where many farmers now don’t have food and income due, mainly, to a combined “siege” from other crop diseases such as Maize Lethal Nicrosis diseases and striga weeds  all of which have reduced farmers’ incomes by an estimated 70 percent.

 

The farmers told scientists from the Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa (OFAB  Tanzania chapter) and reporters that short of deliberate and concerted measures to smoke out the diseases, the nation faces an emergency yet unprecedented in the history of agriculture in the Lake zone  where severe hunger looms large. 

 

The scientists and reporters are visiting the farmers across the Lake zone to assess the effects caused by the diseases in efforts to raise awareness among the farmers and their leaders at village, ward, district and regional levels.

 

Anna Paulo, a farmer at Kisamwene village, Butuguri Ward in Butiama district said that she had planted cassava in her three-acre plot, but the entire crop had been ‘eaten up’ at the time of maturity.

 

“The cassava is already rotten on maturity … when uproot it, the tubers stink and smell like kerosene,” she said.

 

Another farmer, Kasimbi Ndyeti, a resident of Kisamwene village, Butuguri ward, in Butiama district, also said she would ‘nothing to eat’  this year  on account of viral infestation on her two-acre plot.

 

“I planted maize as an alternative crop … but this couldn’t work either … the short rains failed … and the diseases pests (maize lethal Nicrosis) finished off the remaining crop,” she narrated.Read More