Last week, a team consisting of a GIS specialist, 2 rural development specialists and 2 IT specialists conducted a needs assessment with a farmer group and several community based agriculture extension officers in the Mbale district of Western Uganda. The aim of the assessment was to determine the demand and capacity building requirement for developing a network of village level extension agents who serve as “Banana Disease Monitors”. To make this interaction relevant, the team decided to conduct the investigation in an informal setting – on a banana plantation owned by a small farmer named Esther. The needs assessment started with a general question to all of the attending farmers – “Do you have any sick banana plants on your farm?” The unanimous response was “Yes!” The follow-up question was – “Do you know how to treat your sick banana plants?” – which immediately sparked a heated debate on conflicting control strategies. Sadly there was no unanimous response of “Yes!” to this question, only confusion.
Uganda is rated as a major world banana producing country, however, the figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) indicate that for the last 10 years, the country’s banana production has been steadily declining. According to Ubos, Uganda produced 7,909,000 metric tons of bananas in 1995, reduced to 5,545,000 tons in 2000 and further went down to 4,176,000 tons in 2006. Ubos mentions Banana Bacterial Wilt Disease (also known as BXW) and poor crop management as the major contributing factors behind the decline in production.
A study, entitled Xanthomonas Wilt – A threat to Banana Production in East and Central Africa (by researchers at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organization) estimated that the overall economic loss from the BXW disease was $8 billion in the last 10 years, while the production loss (if the disease is left uncontrolled), is estimated at about 53% in cooking bananas in the next 10 years. According to this study, food security for about 100 million people and income to tens of millions of farmers in the Great Lakes region of East and Central Africa have been greatly jeopardized from the spread of this disease.
BXW, a bacterial disease caused by Xanthomonas campestris pv. musacearum was first reported in Uganda in 2001. It has since been reported in DR Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and Burundi, which together constitute the largest banana-producing and consuming region in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Between 2001 and 2007, BXW spread from central parts of Uganda where bananas are grown for subsistence, into more than 35 districts (including areas of intensive banana production). In some parts, the disease attacked 60% of the bananas grown.
Mapping and monitoring crops are important for a number of reasons. Maps of crop type are necessary for the purpose of forecasting yield, collecting crop production statistics, facilitating crop rotation records, mapping soil productivity, identification of factors influencing crop stress, assessment of crop damage (due to storms, drought, and disease) and monitoring farming activity.
Currently, gathering field information for mapping and monitoring small farmer banana disease incidence in Uganda is conducted via agriculture extension officers. This is an expensive, time- consuming, paper-based process which is prone to errors on several levels:
After field data is collected by agriculture extension officers, all written information has to be relayed back to a central collection point (usually a regional office often times with unreliable electricity and poor (at best) internet connectivity) – risking loss of data between farm and computer
In most cases, the data then has to be transferred again to another office with a dedicated staff member responsible for inputting the collected data into a Geographic Information System (GIS) database – risking transcription error, due to various reasons (pages get torn, dirty and/or agriculture extension officers’ hand writing is poor) – the grand majority of the time the agriculture officer is not present during data entry
In order to analyze data (i.e. trend incidence reports, make digital maps, share data with other stakeholders), GIS and agriculture specialists need access to the database on a centralized platform – causing significant time delay between data collection and analysis, resulting in data verification difficulties
The determination of crop diseases and the data collection methodology is highly dependent on the training of the agriculture extension officer, which in many cases is not monitored by the institution analyzing the data – threatening data integrity
The agriculture extension officers (and the associated farmers) do not have access to real-time information or the ability to accurately communicate field observations back to remotely located agriculture specialists for on-site decision making – risking loss of opportunity for on-site data verification and knowledge sharing
Based on these field realities, Grameen Foundation and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) have decided to run a pilot project to test if data collection and transmission through the use of mobile phones (equipped with GPS and digital camera) is a viable alternative to tradition agriculture extension for mapping and monitoring banana disease in Uganda.
To set a standard of excellence for this project, this partnership has assigned a multidisciplinary team, consisting of plant pathologists, a GIS specialist, rural development specialists, and IT professionals to train a specialized corps of community –based agriculture extension officers known as Community Knowledge Workers (or CKWs).
Currently, 40 CKWs are active in two regions of Uganda (Mbale and Bushenyi). These CKWs have been given training in various data collection and information delivery techniques using mobile phone applications, however, this project plans to introduce an intensive training component that will certify CKWs as “Banana Disease Monitors”.
The main objective of this project is to validate, under actual farming conditions (specifically targeting small farmers in remote areas), if disease detection, data collection, disease control management information dissemination and follow-up data verification (including soil and plant sampling to measure disease severity) can be facilitated through the regionally based CKW network.
The ultimate ambition of this project is to be able to ask the same question that was asked to the farmers during the needs assessment – “Do you have any sick plants on your farm” and to get the unanimous answer “No!”
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