Turns out we were ignorant. The CGIAR is doing a heap of work on cassava brown streak disease, as Clair Hershey informed us.
There are several major projects on breeding for resistance, e.g., ”Biotechnology applications to combat cbsd” coordinated by IITA; “Cassava genomics: bridging the gap between sequence and breeding application” funded by Gates; and an ongoing major effort in Uganda to look for resistance in landraces and bred varieties. Also, there is a new project proposal from East Africa to search for resistance in Manihot wild species. This is under review so details aren’t yet available, but hopefully it will be funded.
Which is great. But who knew?