By Emmanuel Elebeke

Food security for any region of the world, including Africa, relies heavily on many factors especially sustainable crop production.

However, diseases caused by various plant pathogens causes crop loss which in turn makes sustainable food production difficult to achieve.

A US-based Nigerian researcher, Dotun Olaoye, in this interview with Vanguard spoke about the need for increased attention towards the consistent development and deployment of sustainable approaches for managing plant diseases causing crop losses in Africa and the world at large.

While speaking on plant disease management, Dotun noted a recent report by National Agricultural Extension and Research Liaison Services (NAERLs) which estimated that farmers in Nigeria recorded about 80% crop yield loss due to pests and diseases in 2022.

He said “This type of crop loss can threaten food availability for many people in Nigeria and other benefiting (neighbouring) countries as well as affect return on investment for farmers”.

On his effort as a researcher, he said “considering the effect of climate change on crop performance, especially on plant disease development, there is a need for robust method (technology) adoption in the development of sustainable and environmentally friendly solutions for managing plant diseases”.

Emphasizing the use of robust approaches and technologies, he said, “while at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, Nigeria, I was part of a team that adopted new technologies (like molecular marker technology) for the development of tomato cultivars that are resistant to fusarium wilt and are adaptable for local production in Nigeria.

Farmers are now able to incorporate these new cultivars in their production pipeline.

Recently, I worked on some crops like spinach and corn. For spinach, downy mildew caused by Peronospora effusa is the most important disease which can cause more than 50% crop loss in any weak (known as susceptible) spinach variety. To develop and deploy precision selection tools such as effective molecular markers for improving resistance against downy mildew pathogen of spinach, I led a project which evaluated cultivars, breeding lines and worldwide germplasm collection of spinach against races of the downy mildew pathogen.

Further, I adopted several cutting-edge approaches and new generation genomic technologies (whole-genome sequencing) to ensure downy mildew resistance genes and sources are identified and documented in spinach. My research identified many downy mildew-resistant spinach cultivars or genotypes and developed new molecular tools that could be deployed in breeding programs in all growing regions of the world. Essentially, Findings from my work are being used by spinach breeders and farmers across the world”, he explained.

On his current research effort, Dotun Olaoye, who is currently affiliated with the University of Missouri-Columbia, United States of America, said, “I am currently working on many projects adopting precision phenotyping methods, computational modelling and genomics approaches towards providing new and sustainable solutions to drive global food production especially in the United States of America and Africa.