Plant health is fundamental to our efforts to eradicate hunger and eliminate poverty. All animals, including us human beings, are entirely dependent on plants and yet when we see a failed harvest or a dead forest, we don’t feel the same as when we see a dead or dying animal. That needs to change.
Animal welfare issues get far more attention from the public than plant health issues. YouTube statistics would tend to support this. The channel “Hope for Paws” has over 1.2 million subscribers, while another channel that deals with plant diseases does not even hit 1.2 thousand(The comments section reveals how emotive the issue of animal welfare is. One ‘Hope for Paws’ subscriber cries out, “i wanna donate so much so please help me so i can help these animals????”. I struggled to find any similar comments on plant health channel.
During a side event at the 43rd session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS43), Craig Fedchock, an advisor at theInternational Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) showed a picture of a failed crop. He asked: how can we create a connection so that more people are aware of how important it is to protect plant health? How can we ask them to be aware of the issue and support it? What role does crop biofortification have – does developing sustainable agriculture systems or food policies have – if we do not have food or plants to work with?
Read the full post on the CFS blog here.
Blogpost by Jana L. Phan, #CFS43 Social Reporter – jana.phan@adelaide.edu.au
Photo Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)
This post is part of the live coverage during the 43rd Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), a project GFAR is running in collaboration with CFS. This post is written by one of our social reporters, and represents the author’s views only.
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