Ethiopian farmers benefit from wheat rust early warning system

Wheat farmers in Ethiopia are the first in a developing country to benefit from an early warning system that can predict wheat rust diseases up to a week before an outbreak.

A research article describing the construction and deployment of the “near real-time” early warning system was recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The system was developed in a collaborative effort by various international role players, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, the University of Cambridge, the UK Met Office, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, and the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency.

According to a statement by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, the early warning system was made possible by using data provided by field and mobile phone surveillance in combination with forecasts for spore dispersal, and forecasts for the presence of environmental conditions suitable for disease. “The cross-disciplinary project draws on expertise from biology, meteorology, agronomy, computer science and telecommunications,” the statement said.

The article stated that wheat provided 20% of humanity’s daily calories. It said wheat rust diseases therefore posed “one of the greatest threats to global food security”, which also included hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers in Ethiopia.

“The fungal spores transmitting wheat rust are dispersed by wind and can remain infectious after dispersal over long distances,” the researchers stated.

Director of the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, Mandefro Nigussie, was quoted as saying that rust diseases posed a great threat to wheat production in Ethiopia.

“The timely information from this new system will help us protect farmers’ yields, and reach our goal of wheat self-sufficiency.”

One of the co-authors of the article, Christopher Gilligan, head of the Epidemiology and Modelling Group at the University of Cambridge in the UK, said the approach could also be adopted in other countries for different crops.

In a recent media report in South Africa, a wheat rust expert at the Agricultural Research Council’s Small Grains Institute, Dr Tarekegn Terefe, highlighted issues such as virulent races that could develop due to genetic mutations, as well as a disease alert about a stripe rust found in Zimbabwe for the first time ever last year.

“As wind-borne spores could spread to South Africa from Zimbabwe, it is important for wheat producers and researchers to be alert for signs of stripe rust infection on previously resistant cultivars.” – Sabrina Dean

FW ARCHIVE ABOVE: A new early warning system for wheat rust introduced in Ethiopia could also be adopted elsewhere on the continent.