Abstract
Emergences of Fusarium wilt, Bacterial wilt and Black Sigatoka diseases have caused banana yield loss of up 100% in Tanzania. Though there have been accumulated empirical data on yield decline due to diseases, lack of disease knowledge and selection of appropriate control methods has been a limiting factor in improving banana production. Therefore, this review focused on identifying different management options for major banana diseases, for purpose of providing reference and decision making tools to farmers, extension officers, researchers and decision makers. Using online resources, we identified several methods which are affordable, applicable and reliable for disease management in the country. These includes sanitation, intercropping, crop rotation, prevention, irrigation, drainage improvement, quarantine, use of silicon/calcium and awareness campaigns. Other method was biological control, which need further research on its applicability and impact on the environment. Moreover the use of resistant cultivars though being important, there is little achievement which have been made on breeding for resistance, because banana are polyploidy, parthenocarpic, have long generation time, loss of resistance and poor acceptability of new cultivars. We also found that, no single method is perfect for management of diseases; this is due to the fact that, in agricultural system, disease challenges rarely occur singly. So the approach to disease management should be pragmatic and geared towards integration of several appropriate methods. We hereby conclude that, researches should focus on identifying the best and feasible combination of control methods that can be used by Smallholder farmers.
Highlights
1.1 General Background Bananas including plantains are the fourth most important dietary staple food after rice, wheat and maize (Nelson et al 2006; Perrier et al 2011; Li et al 2013)
The crop provides households with both food and income, while leaves are used for thatching houses and as animal feeds as pseudostem is (MAFC, 2009)
There are fluctuations marked by declining trend of banana production in the country from 18 t/ha in 1960s to 5-7 t/ha/year (Kilimo trust, 2012; FAOSTAT, 2017)
Summary
1.1 General Background Bananas including plantains are the fourth most important dietary staple food after rice, wheat and maize (Nelson et al 2006; Perrier et al 2011; Li et al 2013). Effects of the disease Fusarium wilt disease in Tanzania, as in other banana producing countries was and has remained among the major threats in banana industry despite the endeavour to manage the disease (Viljoen et al 2016) This is due to the fact that, the disease is only controlled by using resistant cultivars and prevention (Nel et al 2007). 1.4.2 The use of resistant or tolerant cultivars The use of host resistance and tolerance cultivars makes a major contribution towards world food production and is the most effective and sustainable management option for fusarium wilt disease (Ploetz and Pegg, 2000; Moore et al 2001;Companioni et al 2006; Paul et al 2011 Bohra et al 2014). The disease indiscriminately attacks all cultivated banana genotypes (Muchuruza and Melchior, 2013), Kalyebara et al (2006), Smith et al (2008) and Vigheri et al (2009) reported that, upon the arrival of the Xanthomonas wilt of banana entire farms were wiped out by the disease
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