Abstract
Despite public and private extension services and advice of input suppliers (agro vets) for plant protection, crop health problems have remained a major constraint for farmers to achieve potential crop yield in developing countries including Nepal. These agencies provide services based on farmers’ verbal sharing of symptoms of sick plants. This practice increases the cost of production and leads to the use of extra chemicals in environment with a possibility of wrong diagnosis of the plant health problems ultimately impacting environment, human and animal health, food safety, and costs of production. To avoid such problems, the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International introduced a novel concept in plant health service called “Plant Clinic” in 2005, which has now expanded to 3700 clinics in 34 countries including Nepal. Plant clinics are meeting venues where the agricultural extension people trained as “plant doctor” diagnose the crop health problems and provide management advice on crop health by also considering the human and ecological health. This chapter outlines the history, need, and operation procedures of plant clinics in Nepal and recommends way forward for effective implementation of this tool in future.
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Acknowledgements
Authors acknowledge support of Global Plant Clinic and Plantwise of CABI for making useful resources available in public domain for public use. Sincere appreciation to Dr. Eric Boa, former director of Global Plant Clinic, CABI, for his untiring efforts to bring this plant clinic approach for pro-poor and smallholders access and undoubtedly for his continuous encouragement and support to scale up the plant clinic in Nepal as well as drafting this manuscript. Authors acknowledge WVIN, SECARD Nepal and Department of Agriculture for sharing relevant information and reports during preparation of this manuscript. Some of the information of this manuscript is extracted from the PhD dissertation of corresponding author. So, our sincere appreciation to the advisory board members of the dissertation and the concerned university.
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Yubak Dhoj G. C., Adhikari, R.K., Adhikari, S.R., Khatiwada, B.P. (2022). Plant Clinics for Crop Health and Food Security: Experiences from Nepal. In: Timsina, J., Maraseni, T.N., Gauchan, D., Adhikari, J., Ojha, H. (eds) Agriculture, Natural Resources and Food Security. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09555-9_9
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