Medicinal Botany: Plant Science Perspective

Over the past few years, the world has been hit by a series of economic, financial, food and health crises that have sloved down the global efforts to reduce poverty, hunger and life threatening diseases. Today, price volatility and effects of change resulting in the devastating droughts, cyclones and other natural calamities continue to severely undercut such efforts. Achieving food security in its totality continues to be a challenge not only for the developing nations, but also for the developed world. In this context, promoting livelihood resilience, food, fuel and health security has become priority to all the nations across the globe. Today India is the second largest producer of food in the world and has the potential of becoming number one if the emerging problems after the green, white and blue revolutions are properly addressed. However, due to shrinking agricultural lands and poor handling of the produce, post-harvest losses have been high, resulting in a significant gap between gross producation and the net availability to the ever growing population. This can be dealt by in increasing productivity of agriculture through sustainable integrated agro technologies and delivery systems, introducing genetivally and biotechnologically improved high yielding novel crop varieties, inclusion of Nutraceutical and Functional foods which are established to have a physiological benefit or provide protection against chronic diseases as dietary supplements, scientific storage and effective value addition to raw and processed food commodities.

With this back ground, the book is a collection of Resource lectures, Original Research papers and Review articles on the Medicinal Botany – Plant Science Perspectives presented by several Academicians, Scientists, Researchers and Students who participated in a Two day UGC sponsored National Conference entitled ‘Emerging Trends in Value Addition to Plants and Plant products’ during 24th and 25th July 2014 at St. Joseph’s College for Women (Autonomous), Visakhapatnam.