ABSTRACT
Flooding has affected most of the globe at one time or another, as over 70% of earth's land surface is covered by once submerged soils or sediments. For millennia, flooding periodically enriched the soils in many areas of the world, such as the deltas of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile River in Egypt, the Amazon, and the immense river deltas in Asia. The paddy system of growing rice is one of the oldest uses of flooding for plant disease management, as traditional farmers have flooded their rice paddies for millennia. Flooding has been used for insect and weed management. The benefits of natural flooding to plant disease management are illustrated by the increased severity of white rot of onions in Egypt since the construction of the Aswan dam in the 1960s. A major use of flooding in modern agriculture has been for the management of fusarial wilt of bananas, but this practice is no longer used.
