Stem the rot

A fungal disease has hit the most widely sown sugarcane variety in Uttar Pradesh, threatening the country's sugar production

- SHAGUN

IN A typical February, farms in western Uttar Pradesh's Nangla Mubarik village are full of tall rows of ready-to-harvest sugarcane stalks. After all, the village is in Muzaffarnagar, the “sugar bowl of India”. The district also hosts the country's largest jaggery market, accounting for 20 per cent of India's total jaggery production. But when Down To Earth (DTE) visited the village this February, several farms had replaced sugarcane with poplar nurseries. “It is as if someone has cast an evil eye on our sugarcane,” says 80-year-old Satyaveer Singh, a farmer from the village. His family owns around 5 hectares (ha), which has always been entirely under sugarcane. But this season, for the first time, they gave 2 ha on lease for poplar farming. Villages cultivate poplar due to its demand by plywood manufacturing units in the district.

The reason for this shift is the damage that red rot, a fungal disease, has done to the sugarcane crops. Caused by Colletotrichum falcatum, the disease is characterised by a reddish discolouration of rotting internal stalk tissues—which also gives red rot its local name, laal sadan—and a sour, alcoholic odour that emanates when the cane is split open. The disease has spread across not just Muzaffarnagar but also Bijnor, Moradabad and other districts across western Uttar Pradesh over the past two years.

As a result, cane production dropped from 224.25 million tonnes in 2022-23 to 215.81 million tonnes in 2023-24, according to data with the Directorate of Sugarcane Development, Lucknow. Similarly, sugar production fell marginally from 10.48 million tonnes in 2022-23 to 10.41 million tonnes in 2023-24, according to the state's Sugar Industry and Cane Development (SICD) Department.