Crop diseases are a threat to food security and the government will continue to invest necessary efforts to fight them in order to limit the damages they might cause in the lives of farmers and the country’s economy in general, Prime Minister Anastase Murekezi has said.

The premier was speaking in the rural Kinazi sector, Ruhango District, during the official launch of the 2015A farming season, where he joined residents in planting selected cassava varieties on a plot of land that belongs to Koamaki Cooperative.

While addressing residents after the exercise, Murekezi said government is considering the threat of crop diseases seriously, looking at proper strategies to address it.

A recent outbreak of cassava brown streak disease (CBSD), locally known as Kabore, has affected cassava production mainly in the districts of Kamonyi and Ruhango, two major producers of cassava in the country.

In Ruhango District, about 80 per cent of the total cassava plantations have been affected, according to the district Mayor Francois Xavier Mbabazi.

The district has been growing cassava on an estimated 14 000 hectares of land-the same surface it intended to grow this fiscal year. The target has been reduced to only 4000 hectares due to the disease, the mayor says.

In the neighbouring Kamonyi District, recent figures showed that the disease had affected about 90 per cent of the plantations and the disease has also been reported in parts of Nyanza District.

There are fears that operations of Kinazi Cassava Plant, which has been operating at only 40 per cent of its full capacity due to lack of enough raw cassava to process, could be badly affected by the disease, officials said.

Speaking in the remote Gisari cell of Kinazi sector, Premier Murekezi said:"CBSD is causing a huge loss both to farmers and the entire nation."

"You had heeded our advice to extensively grow cassava as a major crop in this area because we had realised it is a wonderful source of revenues. It is sad that you are losing your yields to the disease.”

Premier Murekezi assured farmers that government will not let them down and revealed that efforts are being made to not only contain the spread of the disease but also get new disease-free and resistant varieties that will be distributed to farmers in the future.

He outlined a set of strategies he said would help contain the disease, which include uprooting and destroying already contaminated crops, distributing new disease-free varieties, temporarily replacing cassava with other crops and speeding up research on new disease-resistant cassava varieties, among others.

The premier instructed the Ministry of Agriculture, the Rwanda Agriculture Board and local leaders to ensure that the measures are respected.

"It requires joint efforts to ensure that this disease doesn’t spread to new areas,” he said.To those who had acquired bank loans and invested the money in cassava growing, Murekezi said a mechanism has been put in place to ease the burden on them.

He said majority of the farmers had acquired the loans through the Rwanda Development Bank (BRD) and an agreement has been reached to extend the period they had to service the loans.

Jean Bosco Rekeraho, 46, one of the affected farmers told this paper that the damages caused by the disease are ‘extremely huge’.

Rekeraho said he had acquired Rwf16million loan from BRD that he had invested in cassava growing. He had expected to get over 220 tonnes of cassava from his seven hectares plot of land.

"My dreams have been shattered. This disease has affected a lot our production,” Rekeraho said.