Plant Clinic Towards Plant Health and Food Security

Abstract

Ever-growing population, climatic changes and unprecedented losses due to pests and diseases pose serious threat to food security. Precisely food security implies availability of adequate food to everyone in all times to come. Food and Agriculture Organization of united Nations (FAO) defines “food security” as a state of affairs where all people at all times have access to safe and nutritious food to maintain healthy and active life. Food is one of the three basic needs of man, without which his survival is at stake. Plants constitute the basic source of food and as such, plant health management is crucial to food security, which is jeopardized due to unprecedented threat by large number of insect-pests, diseases, weeds and several edaphic and environmental stresses. Srivastava (2008, 2009) has very well highlighted the importance of plant heath security through phytomedicines/pesticides and plant health clinic in order to prevent 40 per cent losses occurring from field to fork globally. Due to unabated rise in population, reduction in arable land will be an ongoing process, hence we may have to strive hard to grow more food from limited land employing innovative strategies and more importantly adopting multipronged initiative and timely diagnostic and management strategies from plant health clinic to combat attack from pests and environmental stress, manage plant health mitigate losses.