نظام مسائل کلان و خرد حوزه‌ی گیاه‌پزشکی کشور

Farming has always faced with a vast majority of challenges in the field of plant protection, including damages cased by pests, diseases, weeds, environmental stresses, excessive use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Something around 35% of agricultural products are lost annually due to mentioned elements. Although the challenges of plant protection have sporadically been discussed in some literature, a comprehensive and detailed document explaining the challenges and tentative proposed solutions has yet to be reached into the agricultural communication. Considering the pivotal role of plant protection in human health, the number of 297 challenges of plant protection were categorized in Iran, harboring 20 basic problems in four main categories based on available literature and experts’ oponions. In the field of agricultural pesticides (the first major category), the major issues include lack of relevant education and monitoring of pesticides application (44 challenges), fluctuation of agricultural inputs costs (5 challenges), chemical residues in products (23 challenges) and licenseless pesticides prevalence (6 challenges). The pests and diseases category (the second category) focuses on restrictions in the use of biocontrol agents (24 challenges), poor knowledge on climate change (9 challenges) and traditional farming (25 challenges). The third category emphasizes on management and monitoring and aims to focus on noncompeliance of laboratories with defined standards (8 challenges), the lack of agricultural information network (5 challenges), problems derived from manuals of the chemicals (8 challenges), weakness in monitoring of production and presenting chain by experts (21 challenges), low credits (15 challenges), dependence on importance (30 challenges), communication networks of experts in different fields (3 challenges), farmers general knowledge (12 challenges), legal crime prevention rules (7 challenges), lack of appropriate cultivation pattern (12 challenges), nonstandard storage approaches (25 challenges), lower-than-standard mechanization index (13 challenges) and finally, the fourth category focuses on challenges of the academic education in the major of plant protection. As, according to the statistics, only 10% of the research budget is spent in a programmed and planned manner, compiling a comprehensive document on the country's plant protection issues will not only increase the knowledge of the farmers and activists, but also will guide future researches in order to remove the existing obstacles and increase the quality of agricultural products.