IITA joins call for a global surveillance system to detect and halt the spread of crop disease

A team of researchers has argued in Science that as nations collaborate to detect and stop human pandemics, a global surveillance system for crop diseases is needed to safeguard agricultural trade and food security.

How crop diseases affect people
Since 2004, millions of farmers growing cassava in the Great Lakes region of East and Central Africa have been hit by the devastating pandemic of cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) just as they were recovering from losing their production to another catastrophic viral plague—cassava mosaic disease (CMD).
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