In November 2019, three months after Colombia confirmed the presence of Foc R4T, 85 specialists from eleven countries met in Bogotá to agree what the region needed to research in the face of the threat.
On 9 August 2019 Colombia's agricultural institute declared a national phytosanitary emergency after confirming Fusarium wilt tropical race 4 in La Guajira: seven farms affected and 185 hectares eradicated. That confirmation changed the health status of the entire continent. Latin America and the Caribbean produces 28 % of the world's bananas and plantains, five of the ten largest banana exporters are in the region, and 99 % of exported plantain is grown here. The precedent is well known: race 1 of the same fungus wiped out Gros Michel plantations through the 1950s and 1960s. Its resting structures survive up to thirty years in soil and no effective chemical control exists.
Research institutes, plant health authorities and the private sector in one room
The seed fund convened a two-day workshop in Bogotá with a narrow objective: to identify the priorities of a regional research agenda for the exclusion, prevention and management of Foc R4T outbreaks. Research institutes and national and regional plant protection organisations from eleven countries took part, alongside Bioversity, CIRAD, CIAT and the University of Florida. Five panels covered the history and epidemiology of the disease, diagnostic and alert systems, contingency plans, research initiatives under way, and private sector action. Three working groups, one per type of actor, discussed and prioritised the research demands.
The workshop produced not a technology but an ordering of priorities. The eleven national delegations converged on five pillars: exclusion and eradication, resting on biosecurity measures in every country; diagnosis, with unified, certified protocols at regional scale to allow timely detection; evaluation and development of resistant material, covering both the alternatives already available worldwide and countries' own breeding programmes, including traditional plantains; epidemiology, to determine the predisposing factors that shape prevention strategies; and integrated crop management, centred on soil health and quality. Each pillar was broken down into components with timeframes of one to two years, two to five, and more than five.
Knowledge ManagementInnovationStrategy 1. Resilient farmsStrategy 2. Sustainables territoriesAppliedTechnological-Organizational-InstitutionalCropsCapacity buildingPests y DiseasesThe workshop proceedings bring together each country's presentations, the reports of the three working groups, and the prioritisation of activities by pillar with their timeframes, amounting to a stocktake of the capacities and strengths available in the region. A proposed regional strategy for capacity building and research on Foc R4T in Colombia and Ecuador also emerged from it. The underlying agreement is that all eleven delegations, plant health authorities and research institutes alike, converge on the same pillars and needs, which makes common fronts of work possible in place of eleven separate national agendas.
Colombia
Ecuador
The Tangible Impact of Science and Technology in the Field
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