Effect of Climatic Changes on the Incidence of Disease of Winter Pulses

Abstract

The accelerated population growth of Bangladesh has triggered the need for increased food production. To meet the demand of food for increasing population Bangladesh has no other alternative to increase its crop production per unit area, which is a great challenge. Bangladesh has acute shortage of food legumes. The major food legumes generally called pulses are grown during winter months out of which lentil and chickpea are most important. But these crops suffer from disease causing remarkable yield reduction. In the epidemiological outbreak of the disease the climatic factors like temperature, relative humidity rainfall etc. have direct ­contribution. The best instance of which are the occurrence of stemphylium blight diseases of lentil and Botrytis Gray Mold of chickpea. However there are some other diseases also occurring on the winter pulses, which was not present in the crop even before twenty years. There is a gradual change in climatic factors on global basis particularly the trend of increasing ambient temperature seems to have contributed in wide spread out break of the damaging diseases due to which some minor disease is becoming factor of major damages. Rainfall is another important factor responsible for causations crop diseases. Increase or decrease and erratic distributions of rainfall seem to have influenced the severity and occurrence of chickpea and lentil diseases. Change in relative humidity is also responsible for increasing disease severity resulting higher magnitude of crop loss. The relative humidity is again the function of other climatic factors like temperature and rainfall. On careful analysis of the long ranges and gradual change of climatic factors like temperature, relative humidity, rainfall seems to influence the occurrence and severity of crop diseases particularly of winter pulses like lentil and chickpea. To mitigate the damaging affect of winter pulses appropriate variety should be developed having potential for withstanding long range of climatic variations and weather factors.