Last year, the devastating disease wheat blast was observed in South Asia for the first time. Caused by the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype Triticum (MoT) and first discovered in Paraná State, Brazil, in the mid-1980s, blast constitutes a major constraint to wheat production in South America. The sudden appearance of a highly virulent MoT strain in Bangladesh presents a serious threat to food and income security in South Asia, home to 300 million undernourished people and whose inhabitants consume over 100 million tons of wheat each year. Last year, blast caused considerable production losses in Bangladesh. Approximately 15,000 hectares in the south-western and southern districts of Kushtia, Meherpur, Chuadanga, Jessore, Jheneidah, Barisal and Bhola experienced crop losses due to blast.  Average yield loss was estimated at 25-30 percent, but in severely infected fields, the entire crop was lost.

Actively responding to this problem, the Ministry of Agriculture formed a task force through the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council to suggest recommendations to mitigate wheat blast. Recommendations included a combination of integrated pest management and the development and adoption of resistant cultivars and agronomic methods. A fact sheet with recommendations prepared by the task force was distributed among farmers to raise awareness on how to manage wheat blast. In combating the disease, it is paramount that scientists and extension personnel are adequately trained to assess and manage blast.

The Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in partnership with national and international partners, organized a 12-day training on “Taking Action to Mitigate the Threat of Wheat Blast in South Asia: Disease Surveillance and Monitoring Skills” in February in Bangladesh. Experts from CIMMYT, the CGIAR research program on wheat, Cornell University and Kansas State University facilitated the training, in addition to scientists from Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) and Bangladesh Agricultural University, for 40 wheat pathologists and agronomists from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.

The training focused on providing participants information about the science and practical constraints in designing and conducting a disease survey, obtaining and analyzing the results and formulating the interpretation. In-depth classroom and lab sessions were held at BARI’s Wheat Research Center in Dinajpur followed by week-long practical surveillance exercises in farmers’ fields throughout all major wheat growing areas of Bangladesh, and sessions on molecular analysis of wheat blast at BARI in Gazipur. “This training will increase the capacity of Bangladesh and neighboring country scientists, thereby strengthening research on wheat blast and monitoring disease through intensive surveillance,” said Md. Fazle Wahid Khondaker, Additional Secretary (Research), Ministry of Agriculture, at the inaugural session.

The training was funded by BARI, CIMMYT, CSISA, Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat project led by Cornell University and Kansas State University and Australian Center for International Agricultural Research.

 This article is authored by M. Shahidul Haque Khan, Communications Officer, CIMMYT-Bangladesh.

How can agricultural research organizations rapidly and effectively reach large numbers of farmers with messages on improving crop productivity? The overwhelming number of farmers in rural Bangladesh presents formidable challenges to turning research into impact through agricultural extension and farmer training. Through CSISA, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Bangladesh and Agricultural Advisory Society (AAS), an NGO, have worked to overcome this challenge through the use of rural village and television video screenings. This initiative was recently awarded the prestigious international Access Agriculture Award for the use of training videos for farmer outreach in 2015. The Video Outreach award is awarded each year to organizations that show exceptional and inspiring use of video to reach farmers and improve their livelihoods by supplying relevant and entertaining training messages in local languages.

Between 2012 and 2014, CIMMYT-Bangladesh and AAS jointly organised 482 screenings of the Bangla language video ‘Save more, grow more, earn more’ that introduces farmers to the use of small-scale agricultural machinery, which can be attached to two-wheeled tractors for seeding and fertilizing crops in a way that saves fuel and labour, allowing farmers to profit more while reducing irrigation requirements.

Timothy Krupnik and Harun-ar-Rashid with the Access Agriculture Video Outreach Award.

“Our goal was to create wide-scale farmer knowledge of, and demand for, innovative machinery appropriate for the small-scale of farmers’ fields in Bangladesh, while introducing technological options that could allow farmers to conserve important agricultural resources,” said Timothy J. Krupnik, CIMMYT Systems Agronomist. “And by strategically partnering with AAS, we overcame the problem of extension by scaling-up the video’s training messages through entertaining formats that farmers enjoy.”

Harun-Ar-Rashid, Executive Director of AAS said, “The purpose of the video screening organized by the volunteers was to create large-scale farmers awareness and motivation on mechanical planting of various crops through using community-based approaches and strategies along with the full participation of the relevant private sector players and our achievement has been enormous.”

Filmed and produced by Agro-Insight in consultation with CIMMYT and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute, use of the video for farmer outreach was done as part of the USAID- and Bill & Melinda Gates-funded Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA), with screenings held throughout Bangladesh’s Feed the Future zone. Locations included farmers’ fields, markets, schools, community centres, tea stalls and in total, over 110,000 farmers saw the videos in rural village showings.

‘Save more, grow more, earn more’ was also aired by the popular television program, Mati-O-Manush, on BTV 12 times, resulting in a documented viewership of 28 million people nationwide. An additional 3,000 DVDs were distributed by 20 groups of volunteer organizations, including the Department of Agricultural Extension, the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, and local NGO and CBOs, who independently organized screenings. Follow-up research indicating each volunteer reached 180 people each. Similar organizations were engaged by AAS to facilitate additional volunteer showings in 332 communities in 11 districts across south-west Bangladesh. These efforts were documented in a scientific research paper, published in the international peer-reviewed Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension, that analyzed the effectiveness of volunteer groups to distribute videos to larger audiences of farmers.

The award was declared and handed over to the recipient organizations on 12 November in Nairobi, Kenya, in Eastern Africa. To watch the Access Agriculture Video Award Ceremony online, click here.

This article is authored by Mohammad Shahidul Haque Khan, Communications Officer, CIMMYT Bangladesh.

Watch: Save more, grow more, earn more