Integrated management of Potato Late Blight Disease: refining and implementing local strategies through Farmers’ Field Schools

Background

Potatoes are the world’s fourth most important food crop after wheat, rice and maize. The crop has been adopted as a “small-farmer crop” in many tropical and subtropical developing countries, initially in those with highland areas, but more recently at lower altitudes as well, as a winter crop. Potatoes play an important role in the daily nutrition of many poor farm families. In Bolivia, China, Ecuador, Nepal, Peru and Rwanda, per capita consumption of potatoes exceeds 200 kg/year in some rural areas. Potatoes have a high nutritional value, and the crop has tremendous yield potential: 50 to 60 tonne per hectare are obtained under optimal management in the Andean highlands.

Potato Late blight (LB), which is caused by the fungus Phytophthora infestans, is the world’s most important food-crop disease. In developing countries, annual losses from LB are estimated at USD 2 400 million, and an additional USD 742 million is spent on fungicides. LB is a particularly important threat to food security in the potato-growing areas of the highland tropics and lowland subtropics of Asia, Africa and Latin America, mainly because resource-poor farmers have limited capacity to control the disease.

New strains of LB that are more difficult to manage are spreading around the world, and have already reached many developing countries. Their continued spread is almost inevitable and the International Potato Centre (CIP) has as a top priority the development of improved LB-management systems for developing countries. To further its objective, CIP has organized the Global Initiative on Late Blight (GILB) to intensify efforts to control this devastating disease and develop integrated pest management (IPM) strategies for present and future pathogen populations in tropical and subtropical agro-ecosystems.

Grant purpose

To increase and stabilize potato production in developing countries and reduce the negative effects of pesticide dependency through the development and implementation of integrated methods for managing LB in tropical agro-ecosystems.

Components

Activities involve:

• selecting pilot areas in targeted countries, collecting baseline data, and developing strategies for evaluation and deployment of LB-resistant potato varieties with farmer participation;
• ensuring the availability of planting materials of new, promising potato clones or varieties to be tested within Farmers’ Field Schools (FFS) in pilot areas;
• tailoring IPM-LB strategies to specific agro-ecosystems using simulation modelling and geographical information system (GIS) technology;
• research and training through an adapted version of FFS, and farmer-driven research on the integration of disease management methods;
• use of LB training methods and materials based on field guides oriented to extension workers working with farmers; and
• evaluating impact of technologies and participatory methods in the pilot areas.

Impact

The Programme is ongoing, but some lessons have already been learned:

• Farmer Participatory Research and training methodology based on FFS (FPR-FFS) principles is effective.
• Participatory clone evaluation makes FPR-FFS activities more attractive for farmers because it represents the tangible benefit of having access to new genotypes.
• Farmers, researchers and facilitators are involved in a learning process within FPR-FFS. Farmers learn principles of, and technologies for, LB management; facilitators learn how to conduct and evaluate FPR-FFS and deal with potato pests; and researchers learn how new technologies fit farmer needs, and the importance of developing training activities to facilitate farmer understanding of the technologies.
• Results from several FPR-FFS in different communities within a pilot area allow better understanding of LB behaviour under different agro-ecological conditions. The exchange of information across communities reinforces the learning process.
• FPR-FFS implementation is a complicated process that requires organizational and logistic support, and therefore is more expensive than other methods.
• Farmer can be trained as facilitators and they can run their own FFS groups to increase coverage and reduce costs.
• Experiments within FPR-FFS need to be continuously adjusted so that they can be simple enough to be understood by farmers but complex enough to contribute to develop IPM, which in itself is a complex technology.
• Field guides need to be organized as a resource book (instead of a fixed recipe) that can be flexible enough so that facilitators can organize an FFS curriculum according to each location.
• The approach has shown to be flexible enough to enable emphasis to shift from training to research according to the constraints, specific situations and institutional orientation.
• FFS activities should move from IPM to Integrated Crop management (ICM) so that profitability of the potato crop can be improved as a whole.

Links to other IFAD projects

Attempts have been made to establish links with several projects, but permanent linkages have not yet been made:

• Agricultural Research and Training Project, Ethiopia
• Hoima-Kibaale District Development Support Programme, Uganda
• Smallholder Agricultural Improvement Project, Bangladesh
• Northeast Sichuan and Quinghai/Haidong Integrated Agricultural Development Project, China

Links to related research results

Integrated Management of Potato Late Blight Disease: Refining and Implementing Local Strategies through Farmers’ Field Schools

CIP potato late blight research in China

Training material at CIP – where you can find:

• Guía para facilitar el desarrollo de escuelas de campo de agricultures (Guidelines for facilitating the development of farmer field schools, in Spanish).
• Manual de las enfermedades más importantes de la papa en el Perú (Handbook of the most important potato diseases in Peru in Spanish).

Databases related to clones resistant to late blight

Work related to simulation models – and http://www.cipotato.org/gis/tools/castor.htm

Contact

Dr Oscar Ortiz
Project Co-ordinator
CIP HQ
Av. La Molina 1895
Apartado Postal 1558
Lima 12, Peru
Telephone: INT+51+ 1 349 6017/349 5783/349 5777
Fax: INT+51+ 1 349 5638
E-mail: o.ortiz@cgiar.org

Contact in IFAD

Mr Douglas Wholey
Technical Adviser (Agronomist)
Technical Advisory Division, IFAD, Rome.