By Peter Murphy
M'GBASSO, Ivory Coast, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Ivory Coast's cocoa farmers can do much to tackle black pod disease which is thriving in damp weather simply by improving their farming techniques, an agricultural specialist said on Wednesday.
The fungal disease, spread by the wind and insects, has destroyed thousands of cocoa pods in the world's top cocoa grower that were due to be harvested in the new season starting officially in October, following months of good rains.
Jean-Yves Couloud works on the Ivorian division of the Sustainable Tree Crops Programme (STCP), a public-private partnership to improve conditions for African farmers, which also runs Farmer Field Schools teaching cocoa cultivation.
"Education is one of the best ways to combat (it) ... It helps them to understand the development of the disease and fight more effectively against black pod," he told Reuters.
Thirty farmers have been trained at the Farmer Field School in M'Gbasso, a village in the southeast near the border with Ghana. There is little sign of the disease on the one hectare plot used for demonstration and practise of good techniques.
The Field School is marked out into three zones, one in which farmers cultivate using their usual methods, and two other areas where they apply newly acquired techniques, with fertiliser used in one of these zones.
Trainers presented a flip chart graph showing how the prevalence of black pod disease was much higher in the section farmers cultivated without the methods acquired at the school.
"(Composting rotten pods) kills the fungus so it's a way of fighting black pod. Sanitary harvesting involves cutting down rotten pods. We put them outside the field, we advise even to burn them," Couloud said.
HIGHER YIELDS, INCOMES
Visiting the school this week was Bill Guyton, President of the World Cocoa Foundation which was set up by the cocoa industry and chocolate companies to improve living conditions and incomes for farmers and their families.
"About a third of the crop globally is lost each year to diseases and pests," he said. He said the foundation and its research partners are trying to breed disease resistant trees, as is the Ivorian Agricultural National Research Agency CNRA.
STCP staff visiting the school said techniques learned at the Field School enabled farmers to as much as triple their production and said better techniques enabled many to produce a lot of pods without the need to apply fertiliser.
"This has given me much, much money to be able to get medical care. It has helped me to be feed my wife and children. We've changed a lot of practises," said farmer Nao Gnanzou who said he would finish the school in December.
Though months of good rainfall have encouraged the spread of black pod, it has also enabled trees to produce large numbers of pods, many of which are now ripening, so farmers and cocoa exporters remain upbeat about overall output.
