ISLAMABAD: Agricultural scientists and experts here on Monday called for making well coordinated efforts to overcome cotton leave curl virus (CLVC) which was destroying cotton crop worth US$ 60 billion per annum across the global.
While addressing the two-day long first annual workshop on Pak-US-ICARDA Cotton project,they said that CLCV was not posing threats for major cash crop cotton but it was also affecting and harming other food crops and vegetables.
They said that if this deadly virus was not overcome serious issues of food security and supply will emerged with negative impacts of farm out-put and income in agri-economies.
The workshop focusing on enhancing cotton germplasm, improving resistance to cotton leave curl virus disease, supporting cotton best managements practices for small farmers capacity building of researchers.
It was organized by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) in collaboration with United States Department of Agriculture and Ministry of Textile Industry.
Addressing the programme, Secretary Ministry of Textile Industry, Shahid Rasheed said that Pakistan was collaborating with international agencies like FAO, USDA and ICARDA for controlling the virus.
Pakistan has introduced some viral resistant varieties and achieved remarkable results despite adverse circumstances and observed not any swear virus attack during last sowing season, he added.
Dr. Iftikhar Ahmad stressed the need for legislation at federal and provincial level to produce healthy and certified seeds besides improving the certification system in the country to overcome the different species of virus.
With the introduction of healthy certified seeds and by improving the existing seed certification system country can avoid US$ 1 billion losses occurred in the cotton crop, he remarked.
In his remarks, US Agriculture Counselor, Todd Drennan said small farmers are especially vulnerable to the economic impacts caused by this diseases and the US Department of Agriculture has designed the cotton disease research project to help Pakistani farmers.
American agricultural scientists continually visit Pakistan to collaborate on research to combat disease affecting Pakistan's principal crops, especially cotton and wheat, he added.
He said that workshop completes a ten day visit by the American technical team which met Pakistani cotton scientists to discuss the results of research on CLCV.
Todd Drennan informed that the team also visited cotton breeding trials in Faisalabad and Multan as a result of these trials the team reported good news that some new varieties of cotton are showing preliminary signs of resistance to CLCV.
Dr. Jodi Scheffler member of five US scientist team said that under the project about 1855 accession of cotton germplams were transferred from US Pakistan and local partners are multiplying the seeds to increase the number of accession.