Diseases of tropical crops: Problems and controls

Summary

Tropical crops are diverse as to botanical origins and as to function; they have numerous diseases, some of them very damaging. A few characteristic crops and their diseases and causal agents are listed for purposes of illustration. There are several approaches to control of which the cultural, legal and chemical have some uses; by far the most important is by breeding ‘horizontal resistance’ (HR) which is cheapest and ‘environmentally friendly’. Sugarcane is specifically instanced as the best example in the world of outstandingly successful HR breeding programmes; vast areas of a clonal crop are grown in good health without the use of chemical controls.