Plant Clinics for Crop Health and Food Security: Experiences from Nepal

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.