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Caitilyn Allen is a plant pathologist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The WSWS recently ...
Chocolate lovers, beware. Each year 20 percent of the cacao beans that are used to make chocolate are lost to plant diseases, but even greater losses would occur if important diseases spread.
Cocoa from Asia and Africa led to fierce competition, while land partitioning among heirs diluted control. And in the 1980s, cocoa trees were attacked by the witches’ broom disease, infecting crops ...
Cassava Witches' Broom Disease (CWBD), a harvest-reducing pathogen originating in Southeast Asia, has crossed the Pacific and has been detected in French Guiana and Brazil.
The supply shortfall has been caused by a disease which has devastated plantations in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
The country was once the second only to Ivory Coast in cocoa production, but a devastating fungus in the 1980's known as Witches' Broom sharply reduced production.
Abstract Searching for new approaches to confer resistance to diseases in plants is one of the main objectives of the Cacao breeding program (CBP). Witches' broom (WB) and black pod rot (BPR) are ...