B4FA Month in Review – July 2019

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B4FA Month in Review – July 2019

August 9th, 2019

WE HAVE CHANGED …Due to severely restricted funds, we have changed what we do regularly. Our newsletter is now published MONTHLY – this is July’s edition.

We hope you value what we do. We have raised just enough fund to continue until the end of 2019. Now, we still need to raise funds for the future and we also want to forge partnerships with African organisations and individuals so that, through active cooperation, we can together both continue and widen our activities. Can you help, or do you know of someone who might? Or have you any comments and criticisms about what we are doing, and how we could improve? Please contactProfessor Christopher Leaver, CBE, FRS, FRSE or;Bart Ullstein as soon as possible. We really want to hear from you.

JULY HEADLINES

It may be northern hemisphere summer, but news stories on the state of the world’s climate and food supplies, science, bioscience and African farming show no sign of slowing down. What we have included in theMonth in Review is just a sample of the more than 400 stories that we tweeted in July, but we hope that nonetheless you will find this newsletter of interest and useful.

We have to lead with the latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change(IPCC),Climate change and land, led by 103 experts from 54 countries. The report shows that better land management can contribute to tackling climate changeand that the world is best placed to tackle climate change when there is an overall focus on sustainability. “Land plays an important role in the climate system,” said Jim Skea, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III. “Agriculture, forestry and other types of land use account for 23% of human greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time natural land processes absorb carbon dioxide equivalent to almost a third of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry”. The report shows how managing land resources sustainably can help address climate change, “Land already in use could feed the world in a changing climate and provide biomass for renewable energy, but early, far-reaching action across several areas is required,” explained said Hans-Otto Pörtner, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II.

Also this month, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations published its latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World which shows that an estimated 820 million people did not have enough to eat in 2018, up from 811 million in the previous year, which is the third year of increase in a row. This underscores the immense challenge of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030. “Our actions to tackle these troubling trends will have to be bolder, not only in scale but also in terms of multisectoral collaboration,” the heads of the FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development the UN Children’s Fund, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization urge in their joint foreword to the report.

In bioscience, we include a report from the Genetic Literacy Project on the first time a cultivated plant has been breed and commercialized by gene editing when high oleic soybean oil took its place on the market shelves. The gene-edited crop’s most striking feature is that the oil made from it forms less trans fatty acids in frying conditions. The report also shows that other gene-edited agricultural products, including tilapia, herbicide-resistant rice and seedless tomatoes are in the pipeline.

We also carry a report from The Conversation on scientists’ work to solve a potential shortage of phosphate – a resource that is required to grow food. There is, the article explains, a severe conflict between sustainable food production and the use of non-renewable resources in agricultural systems, particularly phosphate – the only form of phosphorus that plants can absorb. But scientists report that global phosphate production could peak around 2030, at the same time as the global population will reach 8.5 billion. Further, several scientists warn that the global phosphate reserve could be totally depleted within the next 50–100 years.

Lastly, we have a report from China that outbreaks of the deadly African swine fever are finally slowing. Agriculture Vice-Minister Yu Kangzhen said China had seen only 44 new cases in the first six months of 2019, bringing the total number of reported cases so far to 143, with 1.16 million pigs having been culled. But, according to the article in the South China Morning Post, farmers may not have reported many outbreaks, while local officials in many provinces have been unwilling to verify the disease. As many as half of China’s breeding pigs are estimated to have died from African swine fever or been slaughtered because of the spreading disease, twice as many as officially acknowledged.

We welcome questions, comments and story links to [email protected]. Please also visit B4FA.org for further reading and useful resources – and follow us on Twitter or Facebook to keep up with daily news and join the conversation.