Plant health and food security
- PDF / 147,584 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 87 Downloads / 215 Views
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Plant health and food security Serge Savary 1 Received: 17 March 2020 / Accepted: 4 July 2020 # Società Italiana di Patologia Vegetale (S.I.Pa.V.) 2020
Plant health matters for many reasons, and the Year of Plant Health, 2020, should provide many illustrations of this. One of these reasons is that plant diseases affect crop performances: plant diseases reduce crop yield and degrade harvest quality. This has heavy consequences on food systems and food security. Yet, the very extent of these impacts, and the reasons why these impacts are so large, often remain implicit rather than explicit. This lack of visibility of the importance of plant diseases towards food security stems from at least two groups of reasons: one is that quantification of crop losses to diseases is so patchy and incomplete, and the other is that diseases impacts are pervasive as they affect the entire food chain and all the components of food security. I shall endeavour to address three aspects in this Opinion article. One concerns the components of food security, which I shall then describe briefly in the ways they are affected by plant diseases. A second is the simple question: “what is food security?”, to which I shall try to answer briefly through an analysis of the publication records of a journal which is published by the International Society for Plant Pathology, and which bears exactly this name: Food Security. I shall then revisit the results of a recent expert survey on the importance of plant diseases on five major global food crops. Various reports describe the components of food security (Savary et al. 2017). These components may be described as follows: 1.
2.
Availability - Primary food production. This component mainly refers to agriculture and agricultural production. But this component also refers to fishing and hunting. Availability - Production-Import-Stockpiles. This component refers to the entire segment linking production to
* Serge Savary [email protected] 1
INRAE - UMR AGIR - Centre INRAE Toulouse-Occitanie, CS52627 - 31326 Castanet-Tolosan, Cedex, France
3.
4.
5.
6.
trade (and food import), and stockpiles. Many countries in the world, or regions within countries, are deficient in their production of food; import is therefore a critical feature to ensure food security. Access - Physical and supply chain. Food needs to be physically accessible, and this depends on the existence of physical infrastructures enabling food transportation (roads, railways, canals), and on physical infrastructures where consumers can access food - markets, for instance. Access - Economical. Economic access to food enables consumers to buy food. In the developing countries, the largest fraction of household income is spent on food: the economic access to food is a critical component of food security. Stability of food production and supply. Instability of production or of the supply of food, is a cause for disruptions in the food supply chain. Such instability is often an important cause for food insecur
Data Loading...
