ABSTRACT
Over US$76 billion from a US$225 billion global harvest of rice, wheat, barley, maize, potato, soybean, cotton and coffee are lost to plant diseases (Oerke et al., 1994). The costs of managing disease and growing less-profitable alternative crops are among other significant economic impacts of plant diseases. The sociopolitical repercussions of major epidemics such as the Irish potato famine (1845–1846) and the Bengal famine (Padmanabhan, 1973) and the threat to human and animal health (IARC, 1993; Payne and Brown, 1998) from mycotoxins and other fungal metabolites go far beyond simple economic impacts. In the USA alone, aflatoxin, fumonisin and deoxynivalenol cause over $1.5 billion loss (Cardwell et al., 2001). Mycotoxins regularly cause suffering and loss of life in developing countries (Bhat et al., 1988), where monitoring and detection are not as advanced.
