Plant Diseases and Food Security in the 21st Century

Part 1. Crop Diseases Threaten Global Food Security. Chapter 1: Potatoes, citrus and coffee under threat(Jean Beagle Ristaino).- Chapter 2: Gone bananas? Current and future impact of Fusarium wilt on production (Randy C. Ploetz).- Part II: Emerging plant diseases and global food security : Chapter 3: Plant diseases, global food security and the role of R. Glenn Anderson (S. Rajaram, H. J. Dubin).- Chapter 4: Optimising reactive disease management using spatially explicit models at the landscape scale (Frédéric Fabre, Jérôme Coville, Nik J. Cunniffe).- Chapter 5: Challenge of virus disease threats to ensuring sustained uptake of vitamin-A-rich sweetpotato in Africa (Jan Kreuze, Wilmer Cuellar, Jan Low).- Part III: Global impacts of plant disease epidemics. Chapter 6: The impact of rice diseases in tropical Asia(N.P. Castilla, J.B. Macasero, J.E. Villa, A.H. Sparks, L. Willocqu, S. Savary).- Chapter 7: Importance of Fusarium spp. in wheat to food security: a global perspective(Toni Petronaitis, Steven Simpfendorfer, Daniel Hüberli).- Chapter 8: Quantitative assessment of consequences of quarantine plant pathogen introductions: from crop losses to environmental impact (Michael Jeger, Giuseppe Stancanelli, Gianni Gilioli, Gregor Urek, Ariena van Bruggen, Jean-Claude Grégoire, Vittorio Rossi, Wopke van der Werf, Alan MacLeod, Gritta Schader, Sybren Vos, Svetla Kozelska, Marco Pautasso, Ciro Gardi, Olaf-Mosbach-Schulz).- Part IV: Innovative techniques for monitoring emerging diseases. Chapter 9: Diagnosis and assessment of some fungal pathogens of rice: novel methods bring new opportunities (Sara Franco Ortega, Davide Spadaro, Maria Lodovica Gullino).- Chapter 10: Automated detection of 'Ca. Liberibacter asiaticus' infection in citrus using immune tissue prints and machine learning(Jonathan Shao, Fang Ding, Shimin Fu, John S. Hartung).- Chapter

Peter Scott is a retired plant pathologist with a research background in plant disease resistance. Based for 20 years at the former Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge, UK he was part of a team of pathologists and breeders focused on management of cereal diseases. He then moved into the field of digital knowledge management at CAB International, Wallingford, UK. He led a global programme to develop the encyclopaedic Crop Protection Compendium and then a series of Compendia on forestry, animal health, aquaculture and invasive species. He remains a plant pathologist at heart. He was a Founding Member of the British Society for Plant Pathology (BSPP). He was Chairman of the 1998 International Congress of Plant Pathology, and led the foundation of the Commission on Global Food Security of the International Society for Plant Pathology (ISPP). He has served as President of BSPP and of ISPP. 

Richard Strange was attracted to plant pathology byits relevance to food security and its excitement as a subject for research, which he pursued for the majority of his professional life at University College London, publishing over 100 papers and two books. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Plant Pathology (ISPP) and has been involved in numerous overseas projects, several of which were located in African countries. He has supervised Ph.D. students from these and other countries of the developing world in topics directly concerned with plant disease problems affecting their food security. After retirement he co-founded, with Peter Scott, ISPP's international journal Food Security, acting as Editor-in-Chief for the first decade of its existence. 

Lise Korsten is Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, Department of Science and Technology, University of Pretoria, and Co-Director of the Centre of Excellence in Food Security where she is responsible for the food safety and regulatory control