Sorghum Diseases in India

Message from SADCC
Preface
SADCC is the acronym for the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference. Presently,
there are nine participating countries: Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland,
Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, (Namibia joined SADCC in 1990).The objective of SADCC is to
strengthen the well-being of their countries and decrease economic dependence on other countries.
There are several important programs in SADCC, agriculture being one. Within agriculture there is a
food security component based in Zimbabwe, and agricultural research is coordinated by Botswana.
Several international centers act as executing agents for programs approved by SADCC. ICRISAT
has one regional program for the improvement of sorghum and millets in Bulawayo and another for
the improvement of groundnuts based at the Chitedze Research Station near Lilongwe, Malawi,
Though the dominant cereal of the SADCC region is maize, sorghum and millets are traditional
and important, particularly in the dry areas. Research to improve these crops is recent compared to
that for maize, wheat, soybeans, and tobacco.
The disease situation is of concern; downy mildew is found widely in the region and leaf diseases
are severe in our nurseries in parts of the area. Grain molds and Striga are also of concern. We now
have a much better idea of which diseases are of priority concern than when we began in 1984, and are
developing strategies to work on them. These will be stated in greater detail in this book.
Message from INTSORMIL
L.R. House
Executive Director,
SADCC/ICRISAT Regional Sorghum
and Millets Improvement Program,
PO Box 776, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe*
Sorghum and millet are vital life-sustaining crops in many parts of the world. The southern African
region is one of the major areas of focus for our collaborative research activities, and many INTSOR-
MIL scientists are involved in projects across many disciplines and countries in the region.
INTSORMIL cooperates with ICRISAT in the long-term degree training program for SADCC
scientists, and many of us enjoy the opportunity of serving as major professors for SADCC graduate
students at our universities in USA. This training program is well underway with 25 SADCC graduate
students currently undertaking MS and PhD degree training in USA. We believe that the long-term
investment in development of the scientific talent in the region will pay handsome dividends in the
future.
I would like to concentrate on two major topics here.
The first concerns fundamentals of the Collaborative Research Support Programs (CRSPs), the
model for collaborative research. The CRSP model is one of several possible means of bringing the
agricultural research capacity of the more developed nations, particularly USA, to bear effectively and
efficiently on the key problems of agriculture in developing nations. It is not or cannot be a short-term
panacea or a long-term solution, but it does hold a great deal of promise as a cost-effective, productive
means of making significant contributions to agricultural development in the developing countries as
a mid-term, interim measure.
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