Region: East Africa > Kenya
Categorized: Socio-economics and impact assessment
Tagged: #fallarmyworm
Do we have a significant experimental yield loss caused by fall armyworm in Kenya ?
Pest occurrences are usually infrequent. The possibility of obtaining real control plots isn’t possible.
Hello Steve Thank for this question. Well a range of studies have estimated yield loss caused by FAW in Africa. Kumela et al. (2018) reported a yield loss of 47% in Kenya based on farmers perceptions. A recent study in Kenya reported 34% yield loss caused by FAW in the long rains of 2017 and 32% in both the short rains of 2017 and long rains of 2018 using community surveys (De Groote et al., 2020). Actual experimental yield loss are usually very infrequent due to pest occurrences and also establishing good control plots as you mentioned. However, CIMMYT-Kenya is currently… Read more »
Dear Jeff,
Thank you for the astonishing feedback, I’m looking forward to the results of the study.
Again, were there specific maize varieties considered for the study?… if yes, which were they?
Dear Steve
Yes they had specific genotypes. pre-commercial tolerant genotypes, OPVs and commercial hybrids
Until now there is no real estimate for yield loss and all the figures published are expectations and forecast. CABI said if no control measure applied 17million tons of corn could be loss due to FAW damages in 12 countries. Such investigations must be made to avoid such estimate.