Current and Emerging Threats to Crops: Building the Knowledge Base

Join USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security as we consider current efforts to combat threats and share a new research opportunity to further the practice.

Crop production is a mainstay for hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across the tropics and subtropics, and is an essential element of food security and sustainable food systems. Farm families depending on crop production face a range of biotic challenges for which effective, safe and environmentally friendly management and control strategies remain elusive.

In some cases, existing threats to production pose recurrent problems, yet sound control methods are lacking. Increasingly, difficulties are also due to emergent threats encountered through invasive pathways bringing new pests, diseases, or weeds. Evolution of new pathogen races, insect biotypes, or other pests pose constitutive challenges to agriculture everywhere, and developing regions are no exception. Emergence of new threats has accelerated through international trade, human mobility, and a changing climate—leaving regions, countries and farmers vulnerable to impacts and often lacking the necessary scientific tools to develop scalable, research-generated solutions.

Our speakers will cover the following topics:

• Rob Bertram and Angela Records: New Activity Design: Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Current and Emerging Threats to Crops
• Muni Muniappan: Biological Control of an Invasive Insect, Papaya Mealybug and an Invasive Weed, Parthenium
• B. M. Prasanna: MLN management in Africa: Intensive multi-disciplinary R4D and multi-institutional  efforts
• Gael Pressoir: Saving Sorghum from Disapparation in Haiti