hickpea is a winter winner for most of the crop's growers in West Asia and North Africa but the switch from spring to winter planting opened it up to a new disease risk.
Winter sowing allows chickpea to establish well, thanks to the availability of moisture, yields can be double those of the later plantings, particularly in dry seasons. It is also much less vulnerable to vascular wilt that can destroy spring plantings.
        As a result of improved winter varieties, many of them based on germplasm supplied to NARS by ICARDA, chickpea cultivation has spread to drier areas. The only shadow on its future was, until now, the increased threat of Ascochyta blight (Didymella rabieie (Kovach) v. Arx) during the more moist, cooler winter months.
        Cultivars with acceptable levels of genetic resistance or tolerance were developed in response to this threat. However, the ability of the fungus populations to produce new variants (races) which can overcome the resistant cultivars prevents complete reliance on genetic resistance, especially in those areas where environmental conditions conducive to disease development prevail.
        ICARDA, with the Syrian national program, has investigated integrated disease management over the last three years on three sites representing different agroecological zones. These were at Tel Hadya, El-Ghab and Hemo. The approach included a number of potential control components but four, in particular, showed the greatest promise.
These were: use of tolerant cultivars adapted to early sowing; seed dressing with fungicides to prevent seed-borne disease; application of a single foliar spray of the fungicide chlorothalonil (Bravo or Clortosip) at seedling or early vegetative growth stages; and delayed sowing until January for lower disease impact than either November or December plantings.
        An integrated management package using these components was tested during the 1999/2000 growing

season at five sites, with farmers' participation. The package was compared with traditional spring plantings using the local variety without seed dressing or foliar spray.
        Although the season did not favor epidemic spread of the disease, the plots where the package was applied performed far better than those planted normally with the same tolerant cultivars, even in researcher-managed trials. The spring planting was a complete failure due to drought.
        These pilot experiments will be continued for two more seasons to determine the advantages of the package. Other cultural practices such as deep plow, field burning of debris, and crop rotation to prevent carryover of disease inoculum in chickpea residues to the next crop will also be evaluated for their role in disease management.

Dr Chrys Akem was formerly Legume Pathologist at ICARDA; Dr Rajendra Malhotra is Principal Chickpea Breeder and Dr Bassam Bayaa is Consultant Legume Pathologist at ICARDA; Mr Mohamed Nazir Mouselli is Plant Pathologist at the Directorate of Agricultural Research, Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform, Syria; and Mrs Siham Kabbabeh is Assistant in Legume Pathology at ICARDA.