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GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT OUTLOOK FOR YOUTH IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
Box 12: Allies in the war against crop infestation
Coconut is an important crop in Southeast Asia and a significant contributor to the local economy. Recently, coconut plantations in the Philippines have faced massive infestations of coconut scale insect (CSI) Aspidiotus rigidus (Watson et al. 2015). Infested trees produce coconuts with sour juice and thin meat. One of the control measures used is the application of neonicotinoids through trunk injections. Considering the negative impacts of these pesticides on non-target species (Section 3.4),
greener pest-control methods are highly sought after. One such is the use of a biological control agent, a natural predator of the CSI pest. A wasp-like insect was recently discovered in the Philippine Southern Tagalog Region, which hatches its eggs inside mugature CSIs (Almarinez et al. 2015). This new species was named Comperiella calauanica (Barrion et al. 2016) and may play a critical role in managing CSI infestations.
Comperiella calauanica (the black insect) is inserting its eggs into a coconut scale insect, Aspidiotus rigidus (yellow and white scales). Scale bar = 0.30 mm.
Source: Ph Dr. Billy Joel Almarinez, De La Salle University, Philippines
change ready while others have had their nutritional value improved. While scientific consensus on the safety of gene-edited crops has yet to be reached (Hilbeck et al. 2015), evidence suggests that growing them has increased farmer profits by up to 68 per cent, increased crop yields by up to 22 per cent, and decreased pesticide use by 37 per cent (Klümper and Qaim 2014).
Food security is everyone’s business
Food security is the availability of clean, safe and affordable food (Pinstrup-Andersen 2009). While it is usually discussed at a global or national scale, everyone can help attain food security without compromising the environment. The easiest way is minimizing waste,
such as food and packaging. Also, adopting healthy diets that are rich in vegetables can help reduce significant amounts of greenhouse gases associated with food and particularly meat production (Tilman and Clark 2014; Baroni et al. 2007). You can get greater access to vegetables easily by growing them in your backyard, or by engaging in urban agriculture (Box 13). This is not just an enjoyable hobby, it could also be profitable if you sell any excess vegetables. Growing you own also ensures that the vegetables you eat are safe. Another easy way is to consume local produce, since such products needed less inputs to pack and transport. These are simple steps that everyone can do without much effort, but the positive impact on the environment will be tremendous.
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