Readers with a long memory and a thing for root crops may remember our various posts over the past couple of years about an outbreak of Taro Leaf Blight in West Africa, and the promise that resistant varieties from the Pacific may hold for combating the epidemic. Well, our friends at the International Network of Edible Aroids are doing something about it. They’ve just published photos of TLB-resistant varieties from the genebank of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Fiji being evaluated in Cameroon. Fingers crossed. And I’m sure collections of the local varieties are being made. Aren’t they?
(Photo by Leke Walter Nkeabeng, Molecular Plant Virus Epidemiologist,
National Scientific Coordinator of Annual Crops, Yaounde, Cameroon,
reproduced by courtesy of the International Network of Edible Aroids)