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Tracking plant pathogens is a vital part of agro-economic development, says Maurizio Vurro.
As with human and animal diseases, the emergence or re-emergence of plant diseases is often due to man’s activities – a consequence of mass tourism, global trade, or changes to farming practises or the environment.
Continue reading Monitoring emerging crop diseases in developing countries
At the launch of the book Science and Innovation for Development on 19 January, co-author Sir Gordon Conway said: “It doesn’t matter where the technology comes from, it matters that it is appropriate.”
Too often international development researchers, policy makers and practitioners get caught up in the source of a technology, and use this as the metric for whether it will be successful.
Continue reading What is an appropriate technology?
The UK has imported food for well over a thousand years. During the industrial revolution, we lost self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs and have never regained it.
We have always been able to buy food from elsewhere and the global food market has become so efficient that the proportion of UK average income spent on food has fallen from 33% in 1957 to 15% in 2006. If food is cheap, reliable, safe and globally abundant, why should the UK worry about local production?
In my view, there are three main reasons why we should not assume that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
Continue reading Why should the UK grow food?
Produce more, impact less. This is the challenge that the NFU’s farmer and grower members have set themselves. It’s a big ask for farmers anywhere and at any time.
But as we prepare to enter the second decade of the 21st century, we are in what the Government Chief Scientist John Beddington famously called ‘the perfect storm’: farmers have to grow their crops and livestock in a way that achieves bigger yields and better quality. But we can’t massively increase our use of fertiliser, pesticides, water, energy. Using these inputs certainly has an impact on the farm balance sheet but it also has an impact on soils, air, water courses and biodiversity.
Continue reading A great opportunity for British farmers
Even in the UK, where we have shown little anxiety about our access to food supplies since the days of rationing in World War 2, food security is back on the agenda.
Climate change could, it seems, be the trigger that makes us overcome our squeamishness about genetically modified crops, according to debates in the popular press. The recent Royal Society report “Reaping the benefits: science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture”, urges universities to work with funding bodies to reverse the decline in subjects relevant to the sustainable intensification of food crop production.
But is technology really going to provide everything that we need or are we simply hoping once again for a quick fix to an extremely complex problem?
