Page sponsored by Texaco Caribbean Limited
Publication: Daily Nation
Paper Section And Page: 15
Paper Date: Thu, Nov 8, 2001
Byline: Compiled by Terry Ally
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Page sponsored by Texaco Caribbean Limited |
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ROME The United Nations food agency approved a framework on Saturday for protecting the variety of the world's crops, seen as key to winning the war on hunger. The so-called International Convention on Plant Genetic Resources was originally agreed by member states of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at a meeting at its Rome headquarters in July. The convention, which aims to ensure that plant genetic resources can be preserved and made available for research and plant breeding, will come into force after it is ratified by at least 40 states.
"This new legally binding
international agreement provides a framework to ensure access to plant
genetic resources, and to related knowledge,
technologies, and internationally agreed funding," FAO, holding its
biennial conference, said in a statement.
After years of anguished debate pitting poor countries and environmentalists against multinational corporations and wealthier nations, the United States agreed for the first time in July to mandatory payments by plant breeders developing new crop varieties in return for access to public seed banks. The seed banks lend out crop seeds, enabling research into new varieties of plants to increase resistance to disease and counter the impact of global warming. In turn, this helps alleviate hunger in poorer nations. FAO director-general Jacques Diouf said the approval of the framework ended years of tortuous negotiations and created an internationally accepted mechanism to protect agricultural biodiversity.
"The approval by the FAO conference of
this International Convention on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and
Agriculture is a milestone in
international cooperation," Diouf said.
Agricultural biodiversity must be saved in order to guarantee global food security as the population grows and the planet warms up, plant geneticists say. Plant varieties are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, according to the Italy-based International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI). IPGRI, an international body dedicated to the conservation and use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, estimates that every year more than 15 million hectares of tropical forest are destroyed. It says eight per cent of plant species run the risk of extinction in the next 25 years. Over the past 50 years high-yielding uniform varieties of crops have taken the place of thousands of local varieties across large productive areas. Scientists will have to develop plant varieties resistant to drought, salinity and disease in order to increase the rate of food production to keep up with the expanding population, plant geneticists say. The FAO conference runs until November 13.
THE American government is enlisting insects.
It is being done through a programme named
the Controlled Biological and Biomimetic Systems Programme of the US Defence
Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) which is spending
US$60 million over five years to harness the instincts and skills of
insects, according to a report in this week's edition of Business Week
Online. The effort is being pursued on three fronts: biosystems research
concentrates on how organisms can be used to support military operations;
biohybrid studies are exploring technologies that exploit natural abilities
and instincts; and biomimetic programmes which attempt to replicate nature.
In the biohybrid category, researchers
first train bees to associate the smell of explosives with food by lacing
sugar-soaked sponges with traces of
TNT. Then they attach small radio packs (the size of half a grain of rice)
to the bees and track them via complex electronic monitoring system located
in an engineered hive. Whenever a tagged bee leaves the colony,
observers can follow its travels and note where it lands. Sensors inside the
hive scan for chemicals or toxins in the bees' bodies. In theory, the
combined information should allow troops to pinpoint and avoid minefields.
Then there is the beetle which has a unique sensory organ under its wings
that can discern a forest fire's infrared signature 40 miles away because it
needs a burned bark in which to lay its eggs.
Researchers have replicated the sensor and a prototype is expected to be available for testing by the United States Air Force within 12 months. If it works, the technology could be used to improve warplanes' ability to identify bombing targets. Understanding how animals move and applying that knowledge to a new generation of robots is another subject of research. There are already robots that move on smooth terrain but there is a need for new robots to move on uneven terrain such as in Afghanistan. They have come up with RHex which mimmicks how a cockroach moves. RHex could be used in search-and-rescue operations, either to scout for survivors amid the rubble of disaster zones like the World Trade Centre site or to bring back information from places where humans fear to tread.