The month of October is here and with it an increased focus on matters environment and how the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) impact on food security and human health.
- Let us start by asking the question; what is biodiversity and ecosystem services?
http://www.fao.org/agriculture/crops/thematic-sitemap/theme/biodiversity/en/
- What are some of the key threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services?
- In this article we focus on three threats: Monsanto’s(now Bayer’s) most popular “harmless” weed killer, Roundup which contains glyphosate, transgenic plants(GMOs), and Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, associated protein 9(CRISPR cas-9) technology; the new gene editing(gene drive) technology.
- Is there any evidence that glyphosate is a threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services? There is increasing evidence that glyphosate kills bees: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/24/monsanto-weedkiller-harms-bees-research-finds and http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/18/1803880115 without bees, there cannot be biodiversity and related ecosystems services; bees are key pollinators and therefore their death spells doom for food security, human health and environmental health.
- Did you know that genetically modified plants (GMOs) are a threat to their wild species “cousins” and have an unfair advantage in propagating themselves, by “over expressing” themselves at the expense of the wild species varieties? The evidence: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00233/full .This is a direct threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services: https://www.testbiotech.org/en/press-release/research-reveals-new-dimension-environmental-risk-posed-genetically-engineered-plants
- Is there evidence that the new so called “precise” gene editing technology, CRISPR, is a threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services by causing “imprecise” and unintended genetic alterations which have negative impacts on human health and environmental health? The evidence: http://foe.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/FOE_GenomeEditingAgReport_final.pdf
- Biodiversity and related ecosystem services, includes the rich variety of medicinal plants and herbs which are, increasingly, found to treat human diseases, including cancers, diabetes and high blood pressure: the evidence: https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-09-27-prevent-diabetes-top-herbs.html and https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-09-27-drug-resistant-breast-cancer-cells-can-be-treated-with-citral-lemongrass.html
- In summary, glyphosate aka Roundup weed killer, transgenic plants(GMOs) and gene editing techniques, like CRISPR, are key threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services.
- What is the way forward? Increase awareness and educate stakeholders who include; policy makers, farmers and consumers, on the need to avoid these types of farm inputs and related chemical-industrial-monoculture-farming and food production systems which are a threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services and instead embrace agro-ecological organic food production and consumption systems (SDG no. 12); these increase and preserve biodiversity and ecosystem services, which in turn, promote environmental and human health.
