The Cassava mosaic virus disease pandemic and its impact on people's livelihoods in East and Central Africa

The expansion of the pandemic of severe cassava mosaic virus disease (CMD) through East and Central Africa has been one of the most economically and socially important global plant disease events of the 21st century. From first reports in the late 1980s in North-Central Uganda, the pandemic has spread to affect cassava across a large area running from the Rift Valley area of East Africa across to the western part of the Congo Basin. Although CMD causes continent-wide losses of more than a billion dollars annually, the impact is most acute in pandemic-affected areas. Producers have attempted to cope with the situation through substitution of cassava with inferior crops, increasing cultivated areas, sale of household goods and laboring to provide extra cash to buy food, foregoing marketing opportunities and migration. Traders have been forced to travel greater distances to find cassava products and market shortages have had a direct negative impact on urban consumers. Significant successes have been realized in reversing negative livelihood impacts by controlling CMD, primarily through the deployment of host plant resistance. However, the continued spread of the pandemic through most of the countries of East and Central Africa and the sheer magnitude of the problem are such that a sustained commitment to its management will be required for at least a decade to come.