" I heard it through the AgLine"

June 2, 2010

 

 

·        New virus ravaging African food staple

·        Will biologicals save the day in Africa?  

·        New package material from fruit skins

·        Online network helps protect food supply

·        Energy from hydropower tough to predict  

 

 

New virus ravaging African food staple

 

(The New York Times) – Inside its tan skin, the white flesh was riddled with necrotic brown lumps, as obviously diseased as any tuberculosis lung or cancerous breast.

 

“Even the pigs refuse this,” she said.

 

The plant was what she called a “2961,” meaning it was Variant No. 2961, the only local strain bred to resist cassava mosaic virus, a disease that caused a major African famine in the 1920s.

 

But this was not mosaic disease, which only stunts the plants. Her field had been attacked by a new and more damaging virus named brown streak, for the marks it leaves on stems.

 

That newcomer, brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food.

 

Although it has been seen on coastal farms for 70 years, a mutant version emerged in Africa’s interior in 2004, “and there has been explosive, pandemic-style spread since then,” said Claude M. Fauquet, director of cassava research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “The speed is just unprecedented, and the farmers are really desperate.”

 

Two years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation convened cassava experts and realized that brown streak “was alarming quite a few people,” said Lawrence Kent, an agriculture program officer at the foundation. It has given $27 million in grants to aid agencies and plant scientists fighting the disease.

 

The threat could become global. After rice and wheat, cassava is the world’s third-largest source of calories. Under many names, including manioc, tapioca and yuca, it is eaten by 800 million people in Africa, South America and Asia.

 

The danger has been likened to that of Phytophthora infestans, the blight that struck European potatoes in the 1840s, setting off a famine that killed perhaps a million people in Ireland and forced even more to emigrate.

 

That event changed the history of all English-speaking countries.

 

Compared with amber waves of grain or the blond tresses of a field of ripe corn, cassava is an inglorious workhorse of a crop, a few spindly red stems sprouting from a clutch of brown tubers. It is filling but not very nutritious; it even contains trace amounts of cyanide, which must be removed by grinding and fermenting.

 

But subsistence farmers depend on it because it’s “very drought-tolerant and very bad-management-tolerant,” said Edward Charles, a team leader for the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative, a six-country consortium based in Kenya and supported by the Gates Foundation. For example, he said, even when farmers are too weak from malaria to weed, their crops survive.

 

Also, the tubers can be left underground for up to three years, so if drought kills a corn or bean crop, the farmer’s family can still fend off starvation. But the plant falls prey to more than 20 pests and diseases.

 

Dr. Fauquet fears brown streak will cross the Congo Basin to Nigeria, the world’s biggest grower, because farmers sell cuttings to one another and border controls are nonexistent or can be evaded with bribes.

 

He is optimistic it will not cross the ocean into Thailand, Brazil, Indonesia or China because there is no world trade in the cuttings and few direct flights to Asia or South America. (Whiteflies, which are thought to spread the virus, have been known to stow aboard planes.)

 

However, he noted, mosaic virus did spread to India from Africa somehow. And Dai Peters, the Cassava Initiative’s director, noted that a mealybug that damages Brazilian cassavas has leapfrogged the globe to infect Thai fields, too.

 

Even if the brown streak virus is contained in Africa, Dr. Fauquet said, donors may eventually be forced to spend billions of dollars on food aid to prevent starving populations from going on the move, which could set off ethnic fighting.

 

Donations by the Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development and a foundation run by Monsanto, the crop technology company, have totaled about $50 million thus far, but compared with the threat, “that’s a droplet in the ocean,” Dr. Fauquet said.

 

The largest Gates grant, $22 million, went to Dr. Peters’s initiative, which is overseen by Catholic Relief Services, an American charity. Working with the national agricultural laboratories of six countries, it combines American computer technology, African rural self-help initiatives and research started a century ago by British colonialists.

 

Right now, there is no cassava strain in Africa immune to brown streak, so the initiative is essentially buying time, teaching farmers to recognize diseased crops, asking them to burn them and offering them clean cuttings so they can get one or two harvests before the virus strikes again.

 

They are hoping for a lucky break, like the success they are finally having against banana wilt, another virus that attacked a different East African staple food.

 

In that case, the solution was relatively simple, said Chris A. Omongo, an entomologist at the National Crops Resources Research Institute in Namulonge, Uganda.

 

Since bees and dirt spread the virus, farmers were taught to nip the purple male flower buds off each stalk and to clean their tools and boots before entering their banana patches.

 

(The virus was jokingly called “banana AIDS,” because it, too, spread along the Uganda-Tanzania highways and rivers. Banana beer was shipped in jerry cans with the fat purple flowers used as stoppers.)

 

Some wild and some foreign cassava strains do appear resistant to brown streak, Dr. Fauquet said, but they lack the taste and consistency that Africans like. (Some cassava strains are grown just for flour, for industrial paste or for the food enhancer MSG.)

 

Dr. Fauquet’s lab is trying to splice genes from them into African varieties. Because of the extensive safety testing required for new plants produced that way, the process will take at least five years, he estimated.

 

Here in Uganda, because there are so few government agricultural agents, the Cassava Initiative is building its own parallel network. Its agents have no power to destroy a crop or seize a truckful of diseased cuttings. But they do have rugged minicomputers with software to help them teach farmers to recognize the disease. They can also pinpoint a suspect field’s GPS location, take photographs and send them from any Internet cafe.

 

To help farmers work together, the initiative also helps them form savings clubs, giving everyone a steel cash box and guidance.

 

Members put in a few dollars each week, and offer loans of $50 or $100 for money-generating projects like buying a flock of hens or brick-making molds. At year’s end, they divide the profit, which can be hefty since the interest rate is 120 percent.

 

Mrs. Nalugo keeps the cash box for her local savings club, and she may have to borrow from it this year. If her cassava crop had been healthy, she estimated, she could have sold it for $500.

 

Instead, she said, “the loss is pushing us back — we will have to buy food.”

 

However, she is a smart farmer. She had learned the symptoms of brown streak from Elijah Kajubi, the initiative’s local agent.

 

When her plants were only knee-high, she said, “I became suspicious, so I planted beans, too.”

 

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Will biologicals safe the day in Africa?  

 

(busiweek.com) – The fight against crop diseases in Africa is expected to take a new turn after the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) announced recently it was embarking on a new project that will enable the use of biological means to control Bemisia Tabaci whitefly that has ruined cassava production.

 

The whiteflies which are driving dual cassava viral pandemic include Cassava Mosaic Disease (CMD) and Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD), are said to be spreading along the Lake Victoria Zone, creating possible food insecurity.

 

Cassava is an important staple food consumed by over 200 million people in Africa, and it provides over 50 per cent of their carbohydrate intake.

 

The plant is known to be drought resistant and for many communities it is the perfect crop to guarantee food security. It does not require costly inputs like fertilizers and it provides both food, fuel and vegetables depending on the community.

 

IITA researchers' survey conducted in 2009 revealed that the whitefly diseases which originated from south eastern Uganda, before entering Tanzania, causes cassava to lose 90 per cent of yields.

 

"The Bemisia whitefly has continued to threaten new areas of cassava production in Africa, especially in Tanzania," said Dr James Legg, the IITA lead scientist.

 

"With the ongoing control project, we intensify efforts to search for and test the effectiveness of natural enemies as part of an integrated disease management strategy," the report said.

 

The two diseases are wreaking havoc in Africa, with scientists quantifying the annual damage at over US$ 1.0 billion to the crop thus jeopardizing food security of millions of people.

 

Speaking in Dar es Salaam during the IITA researchers' meeting to discuss on the 'Novel Strategies for Managing Whitefly on Cassava', Dr Legg identified some critically affected areas in Tanzania as Kagera, Mwanza, Mara, Kigoma and the Coast regions.

 

He said the new initiative includes controlling transmission of the whiteflies by using biological means such as introduction of natural enemies to destroy the pests as well as the use of resistant plants.

 

A survey by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security in Tanzania noted that the whiteflies were first found in Tanzania in 2002 and 2003 in Zanzibar.

 

Dr Legg said a number of the whiteflies have been reported in the Lake Victoria Zone where they have caused physical damage to the food crop. However, no scientific proof on health implications caused by consuming the infected cassava have been recorded.

 

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New package material from fruit skins

 

(foodproductiondaily.com) – Researchers in Malaysia said they have developed a biodegradable plastic packaging from tropical fruit skins that is durable and economic to produce.

 

The Fruitplast product has been pioneered at the University Sain Malaysia (USM) and made from the skins of tropical fruits such as bananas, rambutans and chempedak.

 

Team leader professor Hanafi Ismail said the idea to produce plastic from fruit waste came about because of the perceived potential for bio-degradable plastic which is forecast to grow by up to 30 per cent a year.

 

“Commercial bio-degradable plastic such as polylactic acid (PLA) and polycaprolacton (PCL) that are available in the West are at least eight times as expensive as the petroleum-based, non-biodegradable plastic such as polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP),” said the professor. “We have developed a study to produce bio-degradable plastic using waste products from fruits to reduce costs but which can compete with the quality of the commercial plastics that are currently available in the market.”

 

Fruitplast is estimated to be 10 per cent cheaper than the petroleum-based commercial plastics (PE, PP) and is able to biodegrade within three to six months, said the team.

 

Two years

 

“This innovation also has huge commercial prospects not only in Malaysia but also world-wide because it is based on the concept of sustainability, is cheap and excellent for the packaging industry,” added Hanafi. “The durability of the plastic also has met the standards that have been determined and if it is not exposed to the elements (soil and weather), Fruitplast can remain in its original condition for up to two years.”

 

The university, which funded the project, said Fruitplast won a Gold medal at the International Invention, Innovation and Technology Exhibition (ITEX) 2010, held in Kuala Lumpur recently.

 

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Online network helps protect food supply

 

(Kansas City infoZine) – Washington D.C. When public health experts trace the origins of illness to a food, government officials rush to protect the public by having the item removed from store shelves. Representatives from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as well as state officials visit or call thousands of retailers to ensure they are complying with the FDA food product recall. FDA reviews the information from these checks to ensure the recall is completed in an effort to prevent additional cases of food-borne illness. The process of conducting these recall audit checks involves significant communication among federal, state, and local public health officials.

 

To streamline the process, FDA officials are now working on a pilot program to coordinate food recalls on a secure online platform sponsored by the National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Center of Excellence. This online platform, called FoodSHIELD, provides a place for federal, state, and local public health officials, state laboratory personnel, and regulatory authorities to collaborate on drafting preparedness and response plans. During food system emergencies, this specifically includes the ability to quickly network and communicate with each other.

 

In May 2009, FDA officials conducted a simulation of a recall audit check, using FoodSHIELD to coordinate the effort, according to Jacqueline Little, Ph.D., team leader in the Office of Enforcement within the FDA Office of Regulatory Affairs. Using data from a recent recall, officials from seven states uploaded audit check results into FoodSHIELD. FDA officials in field offices reviewed the information and either approved it or contacted the states to request additional information. In all, the pilot successfully demonstrated the use of FoodSHIELD as a data sharing and communications tool for recalls, and its potential use in the future appears promising. “[The pilot] is a great example of our efforts to collaborate across agencies and on all levels of food protection,” according to Heather Brown, program analyst with the Office of Resource Management in the FDA Office of Regulatory Affairs.

 

While FDA uses FoodSHIELD for coordination during recalls, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which inspects meat, poultry, and processed egg products, uses the online platform’s working group feature to provide valuable information to state officials to help them prepare for emergency situations. In a new effort, FSIS Food Defense Assessment staff is launching a workgroup for sharing vulnerability assessments of its regulated commodities with the states for official use. State officials intend to use the documents to support their own food defense activities and improve their communication with industry. FoodSHIELD provides an ideal platform for this activity because it allows for a vetting process, access controls on documents, and record keeping.

 

Several federal agencies supported FoodSHIELD’s creation. The Association of Food and Drug Officials co-sponsored FoodSHIELD with the DHS-funded NCFPD. DHS awarded a grant in February 2010 to continuing funding the Center of Excellence through 2015, with the University of Minnesota continuing as the lead. USDA, including FSIS, funded FoodSHIELD’s development with a four-year National Integrated Food Safety Initiative grant. The NCFPD will support the platform’s ongoing operations beginning in fiscal year 2010 using funding from DHS, FDA, and USDA. The Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) – a group of federal, state, and local food testing laboratories – also provided funding for the creation of its own portal within FoodSHIELD. FERN, which is co-managed by FSIS and FDA, integrates the nation’s food-testing laboratories into a network that is able to respond to emergencies involving biological, chemical, or radiological contamination of food. Members of the Federal Interagency FoodSHIELD Workgroup, which includes FDA, FSIS, and the DHS Office of Health Affairs (OHA), are developing a charter and business plan for the continued use and funding by federal agencies for the FoodSHIELD platform.

 

Federal, state, and local officials can use FoodSHIELD’s communication capabilities to quickly mobilize in an emergency, according to Travis Goodman, food defense coordinator for the Indiana State Department of Health. Before NCFPD launched FoodSHIELD four years ago, public health officials had to find and collect the contact information needed for urgent communications. Now officials can contact representatives from FDA, DHS, USDA, and relevant state agencies through the FoodSHIELD interface. The platform gives access to about 4,000 contacts, enabling widespread recalls or other actions to be broadcast widely and therefore undertaken quickly. “If you manage to save [response] time, you may just save lives,” Goodman said.

 

FoodSHIELD’s communications environment allows public health and food regulatory officials to share real-time information during an emergency, Brown explained. FoodSHIELD can create working groups for specific threats or set up a Webinar to deal with an emerging threat in minutes, said Shaun Kennedy, director of the NCFPD and a professor at the University of Minnesota. “When there are emerging food-borne illness outbreaks, you’ll have folks sharing information back and forth to identify the source,” Kennedy said. “[FoodSHIELD] gives them a common portal to go through to share information.”

 

Another tool being deployed on FoodSHIELD that is useful in a food supply emergency is the Consequence Management System, a visual modeling tool for predicting the potential effects of a particular incident. The system helps public health officials understand how severe a threat to the food supply could be and how rapidly a contaminant could spread. Developed through a public-private partnership between BTSafety and the NCFPD, the Consequence Management System calculates and displays the potential morbidities, mortalities, and economic impact from a contaminant in the food supply, according to Kennedy. Public health officials can also use the tool to experiment with potential responses to the scenario.

 

“The FoodSHIELD site has uses beyond food supply emergencies. Officials can use FoodSHIELD to find information on issues such as food defense, regulatory programs, public health, laboratory testing, and other related topics,” according to Dr. Patrick McCaskey, executive associate for laboratory services at USDA FSIS. “FoodSHIELD offers members several ways to collaborate online, such as video conferencing as well as online review and editing of documents.”

 

Public health officials working on preparedness plans to keep the food supply secure can use the platform as a virtual workspace. Officials working on the 2010 DHS Food and Agriculture Sector annual report – an update to the nation’s risk management plan designed to protect food supply infrastructure – have used FoodSHIELD to discuss progress and ideas for food preparedness initiatives, according to Goodman.

 

Within DHS, the Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP), OHA, and the Science and Technology Directorate all use FoodSHIELD’s capabilities. OIP obtains food system critical infrastructure information from the states using the platform. The OHA Food, Agriculture, and Veterinary Affairs Defense Division collaborates with states to develop food event capability assessment tools.

 

Federal, state, and local food regulators, laboratory staff, military personnel, and academics are eligible to join FoodSHIELD, located at www.foodshield.org. external link Government members must be vetted to obtain access to secure portions of the Website and to participate in FoodSHIELD working groups. FoodSHIELD currently offers more than 200 working groups.

 

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Energy from hydropower tough to predict  

 

(ieee spectrum) – Energy from river water supplies about one-fifth of the world’s electricity—with 850 to 900 gigawatts of installed capacity worldwide. More than 60 countries get over half their electricity from hydropower. But figuring out how much hydropower will be available in the future, and how those highly dependent nations will fare, is becoming more difficult.

 

The old way of predicting stream flow—by taking records of past flow and designing dams based on those amounts—is ”becoming more complicated because of climate change,” says Dennis Lettenmaier, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle. ”[That’s] not a good way to do it anymore.”

 

Indeed, as the global climate changes—due to both natural fluctuations and human influence—the anticipation of future volatility has led to some confounding predictions. A study commissioned by the Australian government found that average surface water availability in the country’s Murray-Darling river basin—which is critical to the country’s agriculture—could shrink by as much as 34 percent by 2030, or it could rise by up to 11 percent.

 

In tropical and midlatitude rivers, water sources are already flowing less or drying up altogether. A 2009 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., found ”significant changes” in the stream flow of a third of the world’s large rivers from 1948 to 2004, with 6 percent less freshwater flowing into the Pacific and 3 percent less making it to the Indian Ocean. Drainage into the Arctic Ocean, however, rose by about 10 percent.

 

Shrinking rivers have already reduced or even shut down power generation in existing dams when their reservoirs dropped below critical levels. As a result, drought-stricken countries like Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela have suffered periodic blackouts and electricity rationing in recent years. Kenya is quickly developing geothermal and wind power to compensate for unreliable hydropower.

 

Scientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have attempted to tackle the prediction challenge. Using 12 climate models, 8 of which had to agree in order to contribute to the results, they examined how the world’s rivers will likely change over the next 40 years and what that will mean for hydropower production. They found that while midlatitude areas will generally experience reductions in river flow and thus hydropower output, some areas, such as Northern Europe, East Africa, and Southeast Asia, will probably see a boost.

 

As expected, the most at-risk areas are those that have a high dependence on hydropower but will face decreasing river runoff. In Southern Africa, for instance, drier conditions could mean a decline of 70 gigawatt-hours per year in hydropower capacity by 2050. Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Venezuela, and parts of Brazil are likely to be hit hard, too.

 

According to Byman Hamududu, a native of Zambia and one of the lead researchers on the Norwegian study, Norway and other far north countries, where river runoff is likely to increase, have the ability to adapt quickly—for example, by adding turbines to already existing dams to put the extra flow to good use.

 

In other places, particularly in East Africa, where runoff will probably increase, it is ”doubtful if this increase will be put to use,” Hamududu says, because countries may not have the capacity, resources, or political will to develop it.

 

There’s little that can be done in places that will experience reductions in river runoff, Hamududu says. But some hydropower stations, such as the United States’ iconic Hoover Dam, are considering swapping out their turbines for new ones that will work more efficiently at lower water levels.

 

Even though the repercussions are unclear, dams are being built at breakneck speed in places like Brazil, China, and India, much to the chagrin of environmentalists worldwide and the communities the dams affect.

 

But in some places, the case for building more hydropower capacity is strong. In Africa, only about 7 percent of the economic potential for new hydro projects has been developed, according to the International Hydropower Association (IHA). Getting Africa closer to the level of hydroelectric development in the United States or Europe—70 percent and 75 percent, respectively—would provide a vast resource for the continent, says IHA business director Michael Fink. Those levels might be ”the best trade-off between deployment using hydropower and preserving some rivers in a natural state,” he says.

 

However, the challenge of predicting how a hydroelectric dam will perform in the years to come—and the ability of a developing government to keep it up and running—is now making this energy resource a riskier, and perhaps in some cases unpalatable, investment.

To Probe Further

 

Check out the rest of the special report: Water vs Energy.

 

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