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. 2018 May 21;13(5):e0197555.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0197555. eCollection 2018.

Threat of wheat blast to South Asia's food security: An ex-ante analysis

Khondoker Abdul Mottaleb  1 , Pawan Kumar Singh  2 , Kai Sonder  3 , Gideon Kruseman  1 , Thakur Prasad Tiwari  4 , Naresh C D Barma  5 , Paritosh Kumar Malaker  5 , Hans-Joachim Braun  2 , Olaf Erenstein  1
Affiliations

Threat of wheat blast to South Asia's food security: An ex-ante analysis

Khondoker Abdul Mottaleb et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

New biotic stresses have emerged around the globe over the last decades threatening food safety and security. In 2016, scientists confirmed the presence of the devastating wheat-blast disease in Bangladesh, South Asia-its first occurrence outside South America. Severely blast-affected wheat fields had their grain yield wiped out. This poses a severe threat to food security in a densely-populated region with millions of poor inhabitants where wheat is a major staple crop and per capita wheat consumption has been increasing. As an ex ante impact assessment, this study examined potential wheat-blast scenarios in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Based on the agro-climatic conditions in the epicenter, where the disease was first identified in Bangladesh in 2016, this study identified the correspondingly vulnerable areas in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh amounting to 7 million ha. Assuming a conservative scenario of 5-10% for blast-induced wheat production loss, this study estimated the annual potential wheat loss across the sampled countries to be 0.89-1.77 million tons, equivalent to USD 132-264 million. Such losses further threaten an already-precarious national food security, putting pressure on wheat imports and wheat prices. The study is a call for action to tackle the real wheat-blast threat in South Asia.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Wheat consumption trends (kg/capita/year) in selected countries in South Asia.
Source: own calculations based on FAOSTAT [5].
Fig 2
Fig 2. Wheat-blast symptoms in Jhenaidah district, Bangladesh in February 2017.
Panel A: Infected spikes; Panel B: Infected field. Courtesy: Moksedul A. Arafat, Technical Officer, Jessore Hub, CIMMYT, Bangladesh, 2017.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Original districts with wheat-blast in 2016 and new districts with wheat-blast like symptoms in 2017 wheat season in Bangladesh and eastern India.
Source: Bangladesh 2016 [9]; 2017 (authors’ observations); India [14, 15].
Fig 4
Fig 4. South Asia wheat-blast vulnerability map.
Source: Authors’ own estimation.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Publication types

Grants and funding

This paper was supported by the CGIAR research program on WHEAT agro-food systems to GK and Australian Center for International Agriculture Research (ACIAR) CIM/2016/170 to PKS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.