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Sustainable horticulture development and nutrition security Vol III

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Title Sustainable horticulture development and nutrition security Vol III
Edible mushrooms towards achieving nutritional security of small and marginal families
 
Creator Meera Pandey and Senthil Kumaran
 
Subject mushrooms, nutritional security, marginal, families
 
Description Not Available
Mushrooms are great recyclers and play a vital role in maintaining the health of our planet by returning the nutrients into the ecosystem. They also maintain human health by offering better nutrition and medicines. The scientific community in the developed world is beginning to understand this mycological power. However in India, this inherent biological power embodied within the mycelial network of mushrooms remains a vast untapped resource. As the boundaries of scientific research shrink, ecologists, foresters, pharmacologists and mushroom growers can come together to do innovative research for the betterment of this planet. Mushroom biology has the inherent potential to address the three basic problems: shortage of food, diminishing quality of human health and pollution of the environment. At present, about 800 million people in the world are living in poverty. On the other hand, over 70% of agricultural and forest biomass has not been put to total productivity, and have been discarded as waste. Mushroom technology is closely associated with three aspects of wellbeing- food, health and environment. It has the potential to convert lignocellulosic wastes into valuable human food and nutraceutical products, which have many health benefits. Further in the Indian context, mushroom cultivation can be integrated with social and rural upliftment policies of the Government like National rural employment guarantee scheme, mid-day meal schemes in schools, anganwadi schemes for rural women for creating rural employment, betterment of nutrition especially among the children and women. Hence there is a need to diversify the Indian horticulture towards non green food resources and promote research in the areas of applied Mycology for a holistic horticultural/agricultural growth. This article sums up in brief the multifaceted role mushrooms can play in the diversification of Indian horticulture. Although India is bestowed with all favorable conditions for successful mushroom cultivation (availability of agricultural waste, cheap labor and diverse climatic conditions), yet it has not been able to carve a niche for itself due to lack of awareness about this crop. The potential of mushrooms as a multifaceted crop can be utilized for food, medicine, diminishing environmental pollution, bridging the protein gap among vegetarians, mitigating malnutrition, creating self employment especially for women and develop rural – urban agri-network for rural employment, has largely gone unnoticed. Today when the Indian horticulture is looking for diversification, mushrooms stand tall as one of the most important biological components which can play a vital role in finding meaningful solutions to the problem of food, health and environment.
Not Available
 
Date 2019-03-19T03:32:51Z
2019-03-19T03:32:51Z
2018-01-01
 
Type Book chapter
 
Identifier Not Available
978-8665-23-86
http://krishi.icar.gov.in/jspui/handle/123456789/17398
 
Language English
 
Relation Not Available;
 
Publisher Scientific publishers India