Chapter 6 – Disease Management

In sugarcane cropping throughout the world, diseases have been always a major factor associated to losses in production and, therefore, resistance/tolerance traits became main drivers of breeding programs. Here, nine of the most important diseases of sugarcane in Brazil are described in terms of their history, causal agent, symptoms, dissemination and predisposing conditions, and control. Growers have always preferentially cultivated resistant/tolerant varieties but when a productive variety has some disease’s weakness, they must adopt some preventive control measures herein described. Orange rust has been timely included as a potential disease to reach the country at the time of writing (2008), and it do arrived and threatened the crop in less than a year passing.