Plant Pandemics: In the lens of Food Insecurity and Climate Change

On March 24, 2020, India closed its borders, and imposed a nationwide lockdown in the country, believing that restricting human contact would curb and contain the global pandemic.

Illustration by The Geostrata

The spread of pathogens and viruses cannot be stopped with borders and frontiers that resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected more than 7.4 million people in 200 countries.

The waves of the pandemic caused adverse effects on the global community in terms of restriction of human travel, disruptions in supply chains, an increase in the costs of food availability and the rising count of death toll globally.

WHAT ARE PLANT PANDEMICS?

Plant pandemics, a critical issue in the present era, have been overshadowed by human pandemics. These plant disease outbreaks, caused by plant pathogens, are a slow but significant threat to global food security.

The ongoing spread of viruses and pests is leading to plant loss, underscoring the urgent need for action. The looming threat of climate change has further exacerbated this issue, causing insecurity in food production and supply in various regions and across different plant varieties.

Magnaporthe oryzae Triticum (MoT) is a type of fungus that affected wheat production in Bangladesh in 2016. This was the first time such a fungus was observed in Asia, and it had made its footprints earlier in Brazil in 1985 and 2009.

The presence of MoT in Bangladesh has reduced 51% of wheat production yield in the country. India, China, and Bangladesh are significant producers of wheat to the global community; the appearance of such a fungus affects food production, leading to food insecurity not only in the region but also globally.

The situation worsened, and the government announced a “Wheat Holiday”, where India banned wheat cultivation within 5km of the borders of Bangladesh. The fungus even reached Zambia in 2018, causing a wheat blast that eventually affected global food security.  

Researchers have conducted research and found that plant pathogens mutate fast rate and will reach far-reaching lands. Plant pandemics are prominent in the mainstream due to the additional burden of impacts of climate change and globalisation. The implications of food insecurity due to climate change are varied; the significant issue is water availability.

The diminishing water supply in the crop-grown regions, heat stress, storms, flash floods, and rise in temperatures in the tropical areas worsen food production due to crops like wheat that are less heat tolerant. Climate change also restricts the resistance of host plants and creates the growth of new variants of pathogens that infect the ground and make the land barren.

IMPLICATIONS ON FOOD SECURITY

In 2022, the World Bank reported food insecurity had risen from 135 million in 2019 to 345 million in 2022 due to the Ukraine-Russia war. Food production and insecurity resonate on social aspects, which might lead to poverty of almost 43 million people in Africa around 2030.

In similar instances, plant pandemics also instigate a humanitarian crisis that disrupts people's livelihoods and leads to global hunger, which has occurred in the past due to famine.

Down To Earth quotes that the Open Wheat-Blast in Bangladesh paved the way for researchers to analyse and monitor the situation, which eased the path to track the same pathogen variant when it affected South America.

Monitoring plant diseases through genomic surveillance aids in preventing the spread of diseases. As mentioned in the magazine, one example is the new analytic and surveillance systems like the Wheat Disease Early Warning Advisory System (Wheat DEWAS), formed by The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Mexico.

PLANT PANDEMIC AND ITS POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Plant health should be given importance in parallel to human health so that foresight will reduce plant diseases. An increase in global demand for food led to the globalisation of the food trade, which interconnected the food chain link, leading to the spread of harmful diseases across borders to native plants that do not resist foreign pest variants.

New policies should be brought to the global front to constrain these plant pandemics. Numerous reasons lead to the spread of plant diseases: mutations of fungi and pests, food trade, foreign pest varieties and reduced resistance in host plants.

These induce a threat to food supply and production, which has already been on the verge of decline due to climate change mishaps and war in wheat and rice-grown regions, which are staple foods for most of the world's population.

The need of the hour is to promote the intake of locally available foods, and the projection of imported varieties of food has increased food prices and the fascination with such foods. Adopting a multi-cropping system that existed earlier has been a great measure to tackle pest control in the field; when the world shifted to monocropping due to the rise in population and demand for increased food availability, the multi-cropping system lost its significance.

The year 2023 was announced as the International Year of Millets by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations; this brings in the importance of the health and nutritional benefits of millets. As sourced from FAO, India, being the largest producer of millets, can make a far-reaching impact in ensuring global food security.

When plant pandemics can be rectified and eradicated through constant monitoring and screening of pathogens with research and development, diversifying the food consumption pattern will also reduce the burden of producing rice and wheat, as significant crops.

Dryland agriculture should be practised in places with less water availability to manage the climate change issue.

When countries in the global arena discuss balancing power in geopolitics, they, in a minimal manner, acknowledge the rising concerns of the growing world related to food security, which is most important to everybody. A balance of actions with climate change, dealing with plant diseases, and changing food consumption patterns will ensure food security in the future.

---

BY AKSHAYA

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com