Pests & diseases, warming ‘allies’
Bee offers hope of clean alternative to toxic chemicals
ROME, April 21, (RTRS): In the United States, it is a wood-borer beetle that arrived in packaging and which has indirectly caused an estimated 21,000 premature human deaths. In South Korea, it is a worm that forced the government to cut down 10 million pine trees.
And in Africa, it is a maize-munching pest from the Americas that has infested millions of hectares of crops, and threatens the food supply and income of more than 300 million people.
What do they have in common? All three crossed continents to cause havoc on plants.
Although such challenges have been with humankind since the advent of farming, experts warned this week that climate change and biodiversity loss could accelerate and expand their spread.
“You are going to have extreme weather events that can spread these pests more readily,” Geoffrey Donovan, an economist with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“It cannot be a good thing at all,” said Donovan, who has conducted studies on links between trees and human health.
Viliami Kami, chief entomologist at Tonga’s agriculture ministry, agreed that higher temperatures, longer and more severe droughts, and stronger and more frequent cyclones could lead to pest and disease outbreaks.
Pests already cause losses of around $220 billion a year, or around 10-16 percent of harvests, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said at a conference this week.
At the same time, trade in agricultural products is vast: it is worth $1.1 trillion annually, the FAO said, of which food accounts for 80 percent.
But unless this process is carefully managed, it brings increased risks of pests and diseases taking hold in new countries, the FAO warned.
That can happen with the products themselves, but there are risks too with the packaging in which they are shipped: most is made of wood, said Lois Ransom, chair of the Commission on Phytosanitary Measures (CPM), which organised the conference.
“If you don’t look after plant health, we would have massive challenges around achieving food security, protecting the environment and facilitating safe trade,” Ransom told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the conference.
CPM is the governing body for the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC), an international treaty established in 1952 to prevent pests and diseases spreading across international borders via trade.
This week, the CPM adopted new and revised standards for countries to use to prevent pests from jumping borders, including the use of gas insecticide and heating technologies to treat wooden packing materials, killing pests deep inside.
Consequences of a failure to protect plants could go beyond hunger and jobs, and the impact can last generations, said Ransom, an assistant secretary at Australia’s department of agriculture and water resources.
She pointed to how Ireland’s 19th century potato famine killed an estimated million people and saw at least another million emigrate.
“Imagine if Xylella in olives get into the Middle East, where olives are grown in small communities, supporting families,” she said, referring to a vectorborne pest that can attack over 350 plant species, and which has already reached Italy and France.
“If they can no longer grow the olives, then people may have to move. It’s an area of social unrest anyway and ... you’re just compounding a really difficult situation,” Ransom added.
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NEW YORK:
When Veronica Harwood-Stevenson gambled her life savings on research into a rare species of bee, she had no way of knowing whether it would pay off.
The 33-year-old New Zealander, a trained reproductive biologist, had a hunch that the cellophane-like substance in which the Hylaeus bee breeds its larvae could replace toxic chemicals used in plastics.
The idea, inspired by a chance reading of an academic paper while trying to distract herself from a job in film distribution, set her on a completely new life path.
“The results were good,” Harwood-Stevenson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I had just spent my life savings, so I was relieved.”
After Harwood-Stevenson chased around rugged bush to catch specimens, tests revealed that as well as being waterproof, the bee’s nest lining was resistant to fire and certain acids, giving it a wide range of potential uses.
Plastics are commonly treated with chemicals to change their properties, waterproofing them in products from raingear to camping gear and making them fireresistant for firefighters’ jackets and construction tarps.
Those chemicals are drawing scrutiny from environmentalists concerned about the danger they pose to health.
Some studies have linked bisphenol A (BPA), used to stiffen plastic food containers, to a range of possible effects from cancer to heart disease to infertility although this is disputed.
Enter Humble Bee, a Wellington-based startup that has raised NZD $320,000 ($230,000) in private funding as well as a NZD$120,000 government-backed grant since its inception in 2011.
Dissecting the minute bee, which measures no more than 12 mms (about half an inch), to extract its microscopic glands has allowed Humble Bee to chart a chemical pathway to replicate the precious nest lining.
Extracting the genetic code behind the material, the company’s current focus, holds more promises as it would make it cheaper to manufacture and selling the material at a more competitive price, said Harwood-Stevenson.