Disease Management : Recommendations

Abstract

As stated in Chapter 2, potential methods for managing witches’ broom disease fall mainly into three groups, sanitation, spraying with chemicals, and use of host resistance. Cocoa farmers in some of the regions and countries participating in the IWBP had already been faced with the disease for many years before the project started, and some had been applying management techniques. It would be worth briefly summarizing the situation of disease management at the start of the project. In Brazil and Colombia, action was being taken to manage witches’ broom by phytosanitation in areas of hybrid cocoa affected by the disease, but only when the economic climate was favourable. In Ecuador, various management packages had been developed over more than 50 years of research, but such methods were not adopted in the traditional cocoa that made up the bulk of the crop in that country. The disease was a localized problem in Grenada and Trinidad, and very little action was generally taken by farmers. In Venezuela, witches’ broom was only a serious problem in one region of the country, where it was a relatively recent introduction. The general response of the farmers there had been to replace cocoa with other crops.