In the present paper, broad bean rust, fusarium rhizome rot, broad bean zonate spot, yellow leaf curl virus and normal leaves were studied using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometrics. The results show that the spectra of samples were similar, only with minor differences in absorption intensity of several peaks. Second derivative analyses show that the significant difference of all samples was in the range of 1200-700 cm(-1). The data in the range of 1 200-700 cm(-1) were selected to evaluate correlation coefficients, hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) and principal component analysis (PCA). Results showed that the correlation coefficients are larger than 0.928 not only between the healthy leaves, but also between the same diseased leaves. The values between healthy and diseased leaves, and among diseased leaves, are all declined. HCA and PCA yielded about 73.3% and 82.2% accuracy, respectively. This study demonstrated that FTIR techniques might be used to detect crop diseases.