In August 2011 the 27th International Plant Protection Congress will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. A group of scientists will be exchanging information they have been studying and collecting on sustainable plant protection management practices. Their main goal is ensuring the production of sufficient, highest quality food, feed and fiber for the rapidly growing world population.
As farmers intensify their farming systems for higher sustainable yields, the crops become more vulnerable to pest damages, resulting in higher potential losses than under subsistence farming systems. Therefore an improved plant protection technology and better trained technicians and farmers are required. Global organization to regulate this rule is then proposed. It is what is said by Dr. Olof Ryberg, of Sweden, at the First International Congress for Plant Protection in 1946. He thought that the organization shouldn’t have been only planning for the next congresses, but also to take care of the current work on the international plant protection.
What is exactly plant protection?
Plant protection is integrated approaches based on biological control strategies, population dynamics and a molecular and genetic understanding of plant-pathogen, plant-weed and plant-insect interactions in order to minimize damaging species’ impacts upon rural, urban and natural environments.
For the last five decades many changes have occurred in the plant protection sciences. Pest management concepts, tools and tactics have been improved with new approaches. Such new challenges have emerged as the chemical-resistant strains of pests (insects, weeds and pathogens). Chemical usage with undesirable side-effects has also encouraged the implementation of integrated pest management (IPM) systems.
In Integrated Pest Management, detailed study of individual pests, including their biology and ecology, is essential. However, the interactions of the management strategies utilized for an individual pest with other pests within one ecosystem must be understood and implemented in overall management strategy. Such action would maintain the productivity of the global farming. This would be especially important in many developing countries where chronic food shortages occur, where crop losses due to pests are higher than the global average, where crop production technology and effective extension delivery systems are not sufficient, and where environmental damages and health hazards result from pesticides usage by farmers without enough proper knowledge and training.
If Integrated Pest Management systems for plant protection are not applied, there will be no enough food and fiber for the growing population without a shift from subsistence farming in developing countries to an increasingly commercially-oriented form of agriculture.
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Land is so generous that it makes up for every piece of hard work. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
