Emerging and re-emerging diseases of agricultural importance: why local perspectives matter

This paper examines local farmers’ perspectives about emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) of humans, crops and livestock and their impact on household food security in the Tanzania-Uganda interface ecosystem to the west of Lake Victoria. While it is increasingly accepted that such an approach could yield vital information not only regarding the extent of the impact of EIDs but also on practical strategies for their control, recent studies have examined only a narrow part of the disease-food security spectrum, often lacking a clear analysis of how local people conceptualise the co-occurrence, interactions and impact on food security of multiple plant, animal and human disease afflictions. Findings of the present study reveal that farmers perceive diseases as products of wider social, economic, environmental and institutional realities. They employ a wide range of names to describe disease problems and often such labels have nothing in common with the binomial nomenclature used in scientific taxonomy. Frequently, local people’s perceptions of severity of the impact of disease on food security are at variance with views held by experts. Consequently, disease control measures and strategies advocated by experts and policy makers are often not adhered to. This paper reveals that local or emic perspectives on diseases not only convey the sense of how local people feel and think about a particular disease but also how such knowledge shapes their response effort. Finally, the paper argues for a strategy to harness and incorporate aspects of local perspectives and practices into formal disease control programmes.