Climate change could also influence food safety; it is predicted to increase the prevalence of mycotoxin contamination, with new areas becoming at risk and current hotspots having more frequent and severe episodes . Consequently, research into multiple avenues for reducing mycotoxins in human and animal food should be a high priority. Because many diseases and pests are highly mobile and climate change will result in changes in cropping systems, global approaches to management must be deployed across national boundaries. In 17 / Molecular Plant-Microbe Interaction sterms of food security, the effects of climate change may hit developing nations hardest, as these countries will have less nimble crop improvement programs and therefore will be less able to respond to climate change within existing breeding programs. Studying pathogen evolution on a global scale will allow developed and developing countries alike to better anticipate and respond to emerging and potential threats. Investments and collaborations with developing countries are critical to secure future harvests worldwide.The foundational research described above will provide a plethora of possibilities, including immediately implementable opportunities, for improving plant health in the field. No single intervention will provide a complete solution to disease problems; rather, each intervention should be considered as a component of integrated agricultural systems aimed at providing sustainable, high quality yields. This integration will require considerable coordination between academic, government, industrial drying rack and private sector entities. Most developed countries have long traditions of translational research, for example through the Agricultural Experiment Stations in the US; however, state support for the continuum of foundational to translational research has progressively been eroded in both the US and UK as well as elsewhere.
This trend must be reversed if the beneficial impacts of foundational research on global food security are to be realized. There is a fiscal “valley of death” between innovation and effective deployment at scale. This valley should be spanned by adequate public sector funding mechanisms to support pre-competitive translational research, possibly by stimulating collaborations of academic and government labs with small and large biotech and plant breeding companies, both nationally and internationally. It is also critical to have mechanisms, such as the cooperative extension system, to engage with end-users to increase the adoption of newly available solutions. Professional societies such as the American Phytopathological Society and the British Society for Plant Pathology should continue as effective advocates for funding translational research and implementation at the local, national, and global levels. One is the handling of unprecedented amounts of data. Tools are needed to acquire, curate, query, store, and distribute vast datasets as well as integrate plant health information with other datasets, such as climate data, soil characteristics, agricultural activities, and crop performance. We are transitioning from a data poor to a data rich situation. We should be more concerned about false positives than false negatives because the new technologies will present far more potential leads than can be pursued. Consequently, intelligent algorithms based on machine learning are needed to enable decision making in the context of precision, data-driven agriculture. These computational needs are far from unique to the plant health area. Bio-informaticians and computer scientists who are tackling these challenges in other areas need to be recruited to the plant health area. Another key to successful implementation will be the two-way knowledge exchange and partnerships with all constituents in the food production and distribution chain, particularly growers, extension personnel, pest control advisors, and breeding company staff as well as consumer advocates and policy decision makers.
Translational research to enhance food security in developing countries was given specific consideration at the workshop. Developing countries face additional substantial challenges compared to developed countries. The US and UK plant health research communities have been engaged in mutually reinforcing collaborations and cultivation of the rising generation of plant health researchers as part of programs funded by USAID and DIFD as well as foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the CGIAR Consortium. This has resulted in significant cross-fertilization of ideas and exchanges of expertise and experience. In an era in which population growth, climate change, and emerging diseases demand a more global focus, models for integrating developing country partners as effective and equal collaborators are essential. These should be developed by scrutinizing extant and past collaborations for effectiveness, capacity-building of national systems, outcomes, and impact. Strategies for focusing, integrating, and evolving such efforts are necessary to leverage the collective expertise and resources. Such efforts should result in a more responsive, integrated and proactive global community. Although many developing countries in the tropics and subtropics have enhanced their human and infrastructural capacities over the past few decades, these efforts must be improved and accelerated because current capacity is inadequate to tackle the environmental, agroecological, socioeconomic and biodiversity complexities faced by agricultural systems in these regions. As an example, the USAID-supported CRSP and Innovation Lab efforts have trained ~3,500 developing country MSc and PhD scientists in the past 30 years. However, there have been limited efforts to evaluate and leverage this investment by tracking the alumni pool and supporting them in their home countries. The opportunity to access this quiescent expertise should be exploited to integrate these and a rising pool of researchers and other actors in collaborative efforts, and to generate a more global enterprise. Broader collaborations to recruit and support researchers in developing countries would be a major, feasible consequential action.A key component for successful implementation of disease management strategies will be knowledge exchange with farmers. Farmers need to be engaged to ensure that they are aware of innovative approaches and that there is buy-in and adoption. This has to be a two-way process so that researchers are aware of the farmers’ needs and priorities that lead to co-designing of solutions. There are huge opportunities to use information technology to engage with farmers. This is not a substitute for face-to-face meetings, but is complementary to them and keeps contacts active. With resource constraints to reach a very large number of smallholder farmers with poor transport links and few extension personnel, there are opportunities to use mobile phones to crowd source information about plant health priorities and collect feedback on what works and does not work; the CABI Plant wise initiative might serve as a model . Sharing information about potential solutions will target plant health interventions to hotspots where the problems are the most serious. Creation and support of village-based advisers as well as farmer to farmer networks are important because farmers are more convinced when they see another farmer successfully using an approach than if an outsider tells them about it.
GM crops have the potential to make major contributions to food security. In the area of biotic challenges to plant health, they provide means to facilitate control of pests and pathogens for which current control options are inadequate, while greatly reducing the use of chemical protectants and thus reducing the environmental impact of agriculture . GM crops will be increasingly important to prevent a crisis in a more highly regulated pesticide/fungicide world. The commercialization of GM crops has so far been limited to a few crops, focusing primarily on herbicide or insect resistance . GM trait development and deployment should be expanded for traits that directly benefit the consumer and that provide additional sustainability traits, including disease resistance. A more rigorous science based system of risk assessment and an accordingly adjusted regulatory system are needed, to maintain stringent standards where appropriate while lowering the extreme economic cost of making benign and societally beneficial GM crop traits available to farmers and consumers. The ultimate release of GM crops with new traits will depend on advances in research and development, changes in public perception, regulatory requirements, and health and environmental assessments . Adoption will also be facilitated by detailed cost-benefit analyses of economic and societal factors. The opposition to GM organisms is mostly an ideological issue , while consumer antipathy is largely due to a lack of understanding of crop improvement methods and zero tolerance of perceived risk. It is crucial to communicate better with the public and decision makers so as to allay poorly founded concerns about GM technology and to counter emotion-based opposition. It must be effectively conveyed that food crops are the result of breeding that involves a suite of technologies including chemicals, radiation, and molecular tools as well as conventional cross breeding. Transfer of R genes between closely related plants may offer a precedent-establishing an example of GM utilization that a broad sector of the public sees to be low-risk, beneficial, and also achievable but with far more costs, constraints, dry racks for weed and reduced efficacy if done by traditional plant breeding. Genome editing that results in transgene-free genetically improved plants, with useful DNA inserted or deleterious DNA deleted at specific genomic locations, could help promote consumer acceptance of GM crops . Efforts to foster communication among consumers, policy makers, industry representatives, and researchers should be continued so that GM crops benefitting all parties can be more readily brought into use. The potential benefits of GM crops to human health and environmental health need to be communicated more effectively to the public. Novel approaches toward changing public opinion could be deployed through collaborations between social scientists and those engaged in crop improvement. Considerable diplomacy is required because the opposition to GMOs is well funded and organized and resonates with public concerns about the environment and food safety. International collaborations could help provide evidence-based counter-arguments and examples to support a balanced and science-based regulatory policy that would benefit the public, researchers, and the agricultural industry. Britain’s exit from the EU may provide an opportunity for development of its own science-based regulatory framework that is more consistent with those in the US, Australia, and Canada. It is important that farmers and consumers continue to have options for both GM and non-GM crops and food, at a reasonable price. Issues surrounding intellectual property protection of crop cultivars apply to both GM and non-GM crop cultivars. Public sector crop improvement programs could make multiple contributions and may help allay various concerns . It may become essential for governments to enact policies so that publicly beneficial GM crop varieties can become more widely available.There is great potential to increase food production, reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture and enhance global food security, if adequate investments are made. However, this is a time sensitive issue; climate change will likely cause plant health to worsen, reducing food security, and leading to civil strife and mass migrations. Both short term and sustained longer term support for plant health research is necessary to enable both immediate translational implementations and foundational research to address major challenges for which there are currently no solutions. Some funding resources should be designed for flexibility to allow rapid responses to plant health crises when and where they inevitably arise. Global monitoring of the health of major crops modelled on that being conducted for stem rust should be implemented to minimize the vulnerability of the food supply to biotic challenges. There are a broad variety of options for intervention strategies that maximize the evolutionary hurdles that pathogens, pests, or weeds must overcome before they evade control measures. However, development of alternative pest, weed, and disease management strategies is currently not happening fast enough to fill the gap left by losses of chemical protectants due to legislation and evolution of insensitivity. Current and imminent technologies could provide flexible interventions and reduce response times. Control strategies need to evolve at least as fast as the pathogen, pest, or weed; if they do not, then it is an ineffective use of time and resources to pursue those strategies. After further development, genome editing-based allelic replacement and gene insertion hold great promise for accelerating introduction of disease and pest resistance genes into elite cultivars that will be more durable. There are multiple barriers to rapid and effective implementations. These include not only a lack of detailed foundational knowledge but also restrictions on germplasm exchange, legal and financial obstacles to deployment of GM crops, uncertainties surrounding IP and regulatory status of genome editing technologies, a dearth of plant breeders to exploit the wealth of new knowledge and technologies, and inadequate data handling capabilities. The Green Revolution of the last century was largely based on the development of crop cultivars that responded well in terms of yield to high levels of inputs that included fertilizers and control chemicals.