New Delhi (NVI): A safe food supply begins with protecting crops from diseases and toxins. Sound crop protection helps protect the environment by optimizing the use of existing farmland.
In recent decades, due to research and development in the field of agronomy, a wide variety of crop protection products have provided farmers with a set of carefully tailored tools for the production of safe and healthy crops.
Although, in the past, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides have themselves sometimes been viewed as threats to the safety of food and water.
But innovation in crop protection products has come a long way . These days crop protection agents are developed with both human health and the environment firmly in view.
Reportedly, over the course of the last 60 years, these agents have become more targeted and more effective and they are applied much more sparingly. Since the 1950s, the agronomy sector has achieved a remarkable 95 per cent decrease in the average application rate of active ingredients per hectare.
Roughly 600 million people around the world suffer from food-borne illnesses, while an estimated 3 million die from illnesses contracted from unsafe food or water.
This annual toll of 600 million people touches every part of the world, though the worst impacts are felt in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where there is less access to refrigeration and other modern food-preservation technologies. While major improvements have been achieved in some regions since the 1980s, the problem is still vast and urgent.
The need for effective crop protection products has steadily grown as rising global temperatures have expanded the range of many pests and blights.
Advances in agronomy clearly represent an important part of the solution to climate change. The latest crop protection products address climate change directly – by enabling farmers to produce more food per unit of land than ever before in the history of agriculture.
