New research shows how food security in Africa could be protected by an algorithm that can track diseases in banana crops.
The research case studies, conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Benin, have important implications for the 90 million people in East, West and Central Africa who rely on bananas and plantains as a primary food source.
The increasing arrival and spread of serious diseases, fungal infections and viruses, due to climate change and land-use change among other factors, pose a serious food security threat.
There are six major and devastating threats to banana, among them bunchy top disease and Xanthomonas wilt of banana.
“Threats are currently detected by experts in the field using cell phones,” said Michael Gomez Selvaraj, a crop physiologist and co-author at the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.
“But to track and detect diseases across huge tracts of land at country, district or village level, you need a platform that quickly detects threats.”
Information about the severity of the specific threat can be sent to government authorities who can take immediate measures to clamp down on them – protecting food security in Africa.
“Otherwise potential threats multiply quickly, for example, farmers may give infected crop stems to others, and, in the case of a virus, spread it around the country or district without knowing until it’s too late,” said Selvaraj.
The need to preserve banana production in Africa goes beyond the economic benefits – the nutrition benefits of the fruit are immense for how cheap the fruit is, worldwide.
“The next step is to find financial support to bring more partners together, so we can track more data over a wider area. The hope is to cover Africa, India, Australia and Latin America where bananas are a major crop and these threats are looming,” he added.