Biodiversity and occurrence of plant viruses over four decades: Case study for Iraq

During the past 35 years, Iraq has invested a tremendous amount of resources to develop a modern agricultural system. This effort has resulted in a leap, particularly, in cereal and vegetable production that met up to 70% of the nation's demands in 1990s. Since 2003, the percent has dropped to score 35% in the year 2010 due to political unrest. Although the agricultural system has been extremely affected in the past 15 years, farmers have been struggling to keep on their business and to contribute to the Iraqi market against high competent producers that include big agricultural neighboring countries like Turkey, Iran and Syria. However, there is another important issue tackling the production and has not been well documented in Iraq. This issue is the plant disease and viral diseases in particular, which has been a limiting factor for sustainable production of many important crops in Iraq. This article presents a comprehensive view on the plant viruses, their importance, and distribution in Iraq. Collectively, there are 43 different viruses reported countrywide. Most studies have been published in local journals, which are published in Arabic. The data presented in this article were gleaned from literatures publicly available from local and international publications as well as conferences and official reports. We are here abstracting the information about virus diseases in Iraq for the first time in order to present it internationally rather than locally.