CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

We're moving!

We’re moving!

After almost 12 years, the CABI blog is migrating to a new platform and a new URL: https://blog.cabi.org/ Our new blog will be built on WordPress, which means it’ll look better and load faster on mobile devices and feature better social media integration. The commenting system is also more robust, and the CABI blog is now better integrated with CABI’s other blogs (on Plantwise and Invasives).

 

If you currently subscribe to the blog via RSS or email you will no longer receive updates. To keep receiving alerts whenever we post a new article, please visit https://blog.cabi.org/ and re-subscribe. Don’t worry about losing your favourite article from the last 12 years – all of our archives have been migrated as well.

 

We look forward to sharing stories about our online resources, publishing products and our work in international development in our new home!

To bee or not to bee

 

Image Credit: Myriams-Fotos via Pixabay (CC0)

This Sunday the UK celebrated World Bee Day (May 20^th); the first year of the now to be annual UN awareness event aimed at increasing our sensitivity to the global importance and increasing struggle of pollinators. Whilst the event hopes to increase understanding of pollinators generally, including butterflies, moths, birds and bats, the focus is strongly on wild and managed bees for their economic importance. And justly so; bees visit over 70 crops in the UK alone and are worth billions worldwide in the pollination service they provide. However, it would be difficult to miss the worryingly-frequent headlines warning of bee decline both in the UK and globally as a result of human activities.

International Day for Biological Diversity 2018

Image credit: Convention on Biological Diversity IDB2018 Accessed: 18/05/2018 (https://www.cbd.int/idb/2018/)

This year the 22^nd of May will be a celebration of the progress made since the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity 25 years ago. The International day for Biological Diversity was designed to overlap with the UNs post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals and the date chose to commemorate the adoption of the Convention of Biodiversity in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. Previous themes promoted over the years have included: biodiversity and sustainable tourism, water and biodiversity, invasive alien species and biodiversity and climate change.

Showcasing smart agriculture in comic exhibition

Comics have long played a role in entertaining young people, and even adults, going right back to the Golden Age of Comic books in the 1930s. One only has to think of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel and many more.

But you would be forgiven for being surprised at knowing that comics can also have a very important role to play in educating teenagers and young adults about the value science and technology holds in helping farmers grow more and lose less.

Now, an exhibition of the comic book Shujaaz (which means ‘hero’) – presented by Karamel at Collage Arts, is revealing how animation and narrative knits together to tell the story of how smart agriculture, as well as issues including unemployment, corruption, youth, cost of living and infrastructure, can be raised with Kenyan and Tanzanian 15-24 year olds.

Termite workshop photo special - exploring tree-damaging termites in the tropics

CABI scientists have held a successful three-day workshop exploring how to diagnose and manage termites associated with structures and trees in the tropics.

The workshop, held at CABI’s South East Asia (SEA) office building at MARDI in Serdang, Malaysia, highlighted termites as ecologically important insects with significant roles to play as decomposers but also as pests that can cause major damage to trees and buildings.

This photo blog charts the three-day event officially opened by Dr Sivapragasam Annamalai, Regional Director of CABI SEA, and which included a welcome by CABI CEO Dr Trevor Nicholls.

Cutting plastic bottle use in adventure travel

Earth Day 2018 is on Sunday April 22, and the theme for this year is ending plastic pollution. One of the biggest sources of plastic waste from the general public is single-use plastic bottles, and tourists are a big source of this waste. Even those of us who rarely use disposable drinks bottles when at home often use several a day when travelling. Western tourists travelling to developing countries where they do not trust the local drinking water are regular high users, often buying single-use bottles for all the water they use. The travel trade is trying to reduce this use, and the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA) committed to curbing the use of single-use plastic bottles as one of its strategic initiatives in 2018. To get a picture of the current situation among ATTA members, ATTA teamed up with Travelers Against Plastic (TAP) to create and distribute a survey to the ATTA and TAP’s database of adventure tourism businesses. The results show that despite high levels of awareness and concern, most adventure travel firms still use plastic water bottles on many of their trips. 

Earth Day 2018 - The campaign to eliminate plastic pollution

[Image credit: Pixabay - hhach]

This blog post was written by our new Content Editor - Ellen Baker, ahead of Earth Day on Sunday 22nd April.

This year the annual environmental issues awareness event ‘Earth day’ is focussing on the topic of plastic pollution; the problems generated by our high usage of single use plastics have been a campaign point for numerous environmental groups for many years but the topic of plastic pollution has recently been brought to the forefront of public discussion by the hugely popular BBC documentary Blue Planet II. Prompted by the poignant last episode of the series which featured this topic heavily, the nationwide programme narrated by Sir David Attenborough has appeared to catalyse a change in public opinion on plastic waste, what some have subsequently dubbed this the ‘Blue planet effect’.

"Food Forests can be a part of Urban Cultivation" by Antoinette WinklerPrins

Urban cultivation (UC) refers to a range of practices at various scales that include the growing, processing, and marketing of crops (often called urban agriculture), the tending of livestock, and apiculture, in urban and peri-urban areas, mostly for consumption in the same urban space (WinklerPrins 2017). According to the United Nations, the world population is increasingly urbanizing, currently at about 54% but trending toward at least 66% by 2050, and with much higher rates in many parts of the globe (UN 2014). 

Emerging contaminants – a growing concern?

[Image credit: minthu]

Over the last 200 years, the global population has been growing at an exponential rate and according to the UN, is predicted to reach 8.5 billion by 2030. The population increase to date, has been supported by the development of agricultural, industrial and health care resources, which has led to the rise in the production and use of a variety of different chemicals.  In recent years, many of the substances, either used in or created by these industries have been named as “emerging contaminants” (EC’s).  Until very recently, the main focus of the impacts that chemicals cause in the environment was mainly attributed to heavy metals, active ingredients traditionally used in pesticides and persistent organic pollutants.  However, concern has been growing over the environmental and health risks of EC’s. Many EC’s are considered to be water pollutants, yet they remain largely unregulated by current water-quality standards.  So what are these chemicals and why are they a problem?

How Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) Enter the Food Chain in non-GMO Producing Countries

The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in livestock and crops, as well as trade and consumption of GMOs are highly controversial topics.

Proponents of genetic engineering argue that GMOs represent the only viable solution to food shortages in an ever-growing global population. They claim that the use of GMOs in agriculture and their consumption have caused no harm to livestock or humans so far. Heated debate also persists over GMO food labelling, with food manufacturers in the USA arguing that mandatory GMO labelling hinders the development of agricultural biotechnology, and may also "exacerbate the misconception” that GMOs endanger human health.

Animals: GMO or non-GMO?

However, opponents of GMOs are far from convinced, and they are concerned about the potentially negative impact of GMOs on the environment, livestock and humans. The inevitability of GMO-contamination to some level has been widely recognised in non-GMO producing countries, but many countries, including EU countries, seek to control its spread. Opponents of GMOs are also concerned about the lack of data on the long-term effects of GMO use. These concerns have been effective in limiting GMO acceptance by the public.

Our guest blogger, Dr Tatjana Brankov of University of Novi Sad, Serbia, in her opinion piece below, describes how GMOs find their way to the daily diet of livestock, and subsequently to human diet, in different geographical regions of the world, including non-GMO producing countries.

To find out what this means for customers who want to avoid GMOs in their diet, or to farmers who want to keep their farms GMO-free, read on…

 

How Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) enter the food chain in non-GMO producing countries

by Tatjana Brankov, Faculty of Economics, University of Novi Sad, Serbia.

Edited by M Djuric, CAB International, Wallingford, UK 

A superficial review of the legislation on transgenic foods and feeds indicates that consumers in non-GMO producing countries consume GMO-free food. However, less attention is paid to the fact that GMOs can enter the food chain through the import of transgenic foodstuff and feedstuff or by contamination.

Crops: GMO or non-GMO?

In some countries, transgenic food production is fully equal to conventional production. The concept of substantial equivalence, developed by the OECD and further elaborated by FAO/WHO “embodies the concept that if a new food or food component is found to be substantially equivalent to an existing food or food component, it can be treated in the same manner with respect to safety, i.e. the food or food component can be concluded to be as safe as the conventional food or food component” (FAO/WHO 1996). Such a situation exists in a number of countries, including the USA, where it has been estimated that up to 75% of processed foods on supermarket shelves, from soda to soup, and from crackers to condiments contain GMO ingredients (Center for Food Safety 2017).

On the other side, EU countries apply the precautionary principle as a guiding approach for trans-border movement of GMOs (Myhr and Traavik, 2002). As the EUR-Lex glossary explains, this principle “relates to an approach to risk management whereby, if there is the possibility that a given policy or action might cause harm to the public or the environment and if there is still no scientific consensus on the issue, the policy or action in question should not be pursued.”