Phytopathogens: A Future Risk of a COVID-like Pandemic in Agriculture

Abstract

The current global pandemic of COVID-19 has exposed the inadequacies of medical infrastructure of the most advanced nations andfastest-developing regions of the world. But have we ever thought about the possibility of a natural or man-made agricultural pandemic on the scale of COVID-19? There is sufficient evidence from thepast experiences which suggest that mankind is eager to develop a biological weapon capable of causing severe damage to a wide variety of agricultural products/crops. W e have seen in the last century how destructive natural epidemics can be; with the Irish famine and the Great Bengal famine, leaving millions of people starving, dead, and forced to relocate. But if humans aresuccessful in development of biological weapons to use against food crops, dire consequences might ensue. Don't forget that we are still unable to provideenough food to feed the world's 7 billion people. Diseases with epidemic potential like Late blight of potatoes, W heat rust and Wheat blast are very serious food and biosecurity threats and that could be used as a bio-weapon against agricultural crops. Others like the Corn leaf blight diseases, Banana Xanthomonas wilt, Maize lethal necrosis disease, W heat streak mosaic disease (WSMD), and Tomato brown rugose fruit disease are just some of the plant diseases that could also discussed in this article that pose serious threats to global food security. Though the human healthcare sector is more advanced than the agriculture sector's infrastructure, we were not able to contain the spread of COVID-19. Therefore, now is the time to learn the lessons and put in place procedures,and implement stringent rules and strategies for the agricultural sector tocontrol the spread of these catastrophic plant diseases at both domestic and international levels.