Eighty years of sugarcane quarantine in South Africa.

The South African Sugarcane Research Institute (SASRI) exchanges sugarcane varieties with many different countries, including Australia, United States of America, Colombia, Brazil, Barbados and Zimbabwe, mainly to increase the genetic pool of parents for breeding new varieties. Imported varieties are also evaluated as potential commercial varieties. The movement of sugarcane between countries carries a risk of introducing potentially serious diseases and therefore requires stringent quarantine procedures. The current quarantine facility at SASRI, Mount Edgecombe, has been in use since 1984. It replaced the sugar industry’s original quarantine glasshouse that was built in the Botanic Gardens, Durban, in the mid-1920s. Twenty-one years after its opening, the current facility at Mount Edgecombe can be described as a world-class laboratory where molecular techniques are used for the accurate detection of the most important sugarcane pathogens. The release of imported varieties from quarantine over the past two years has been seriously hampered by the frequent presence of the sugarcane yellow leaf virus (SCYLV). A new tissue culture facility for the ‘cleaning’ of diseases such as SCYLV, sugarcane mosaic virus (SCMV) and unknown viral diseases from varieties was recently added to the quarantine building. This enables SASRI to eliminate most pathogens from imported sugarcane varieties, so that disease-free plants can be used in the breeding programme. It also ensures that SASRI will soon be in a position to export healthy, tissue culture-derived plants of South African bred (N) varieties, instead of the conventional setts. The history of, and new developments in, sugarcane quarantine in South Africa are discussed in this paper.