Crop loss analysis and global food supply: Focusing now on required harvests

Historically, the path of crop loss assessment research has known three phases: exploratory, development and implementation. These phases took place at different periods of agricultural research, with a common thread to improve our knowledge of the impact of diseases on crop yield quantity and quality. In this review, we provide a discussion on these phases. In particular, we emphasize the seminal research that has laid a foundation for a new phase to develop. We do this through an examination of the measurement of injury and crop losses, the current statistical models used to define thresholds and damage functions, and what is currently known regarding qualitative losses. Crop loss research enters a fourth phase of crop loss assessment, the multicriteria assessment phase. In the latter portion of the review, we provide a brief discussion on the efforts, the concepts, and the necessary multidisciplinary dialogue, that the multi-criteria assessment phase requires in order for crop loss assessment to truly change the ways diseases are managed and how management itself is truly seen among the disciplinary fields that contribute to sustainable agricultural development.