Research conducted at the University of the Philippines – Los Baños, found that the most serious non-native pests, such as the rice black bug, leaf miner, potato cyst nematode, and mealy bug were all accidentally introduced to the country through imports.
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN is considering implementing an international phytosanitary standard directed primarily at sea shipping, given that the one-year grace period to allow countries to tighten protections against invasive biological species will expire this year.
“The crop losses and control costs triggered by exotic pests amount to a hefty tax on food, fiber and forage production,” says Craig Fedchock, coordinator of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)-based International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) Secretariat. “All told, fruit flies, beetles, fungi and their kin reduce global crop yields by between 20 and 40 percent,” he explained.
The FAO pointed out that invasive species have historically dramatically affected food production, and that sea shipping has largely been the means by which species, which may be entirely benign in their native habitats, arrive and wreak havoc in far-away countries.
Shipping containers carry pests
The FAO noted, however, that the growth in sea shipping, with most of the cargo carried in containers, is putting severe pressure on efforts to control invasive species. The report cites data that about 527 million sea container trips are made each year, and that China alone deals with over 133 million sea containers annually.
“It is not only their cargo, but the steel contraptions themselves, that can serve as vectors for the spread of exotic species capable of wreaking ecological and agricultural havoc,” the FAO said. The organization said that an analysis of 116,701 empty sea containers arriving in New Zealand over the past five years showed that one in 10 was contaminated on the outside, twice the rate of interior contamination. Unwelcome pests included the gypsy moth, the Giant African snail, Argentine ants and the brown marmorated stink bug, each of which threaten crops, forests and urban environments. Soil residues, meanwhile, can contain the seeds of invasive plants, nematodes and plant pathogens.
“Inspection records from the United States, Australia, China and New Zealand indicate that thousands of organisms from a wide range of taxa are being moved unintentionally with sea containers,” the study’s lead scientist, Eckehard Brockerhoff of the New Zealand Forest Research Institute, told a recent meeting at FAO of the Commission on Phytosanitary Measures (CPM), IPPC’s governing body.
Philippines invaders
Estimates for crop losses from invasive species in the Philippines are difficult to find, but on a global scale, Brockerhoff said biological invasions inflict damages amounting to around five percent of annual global economic activity, equivalent to about a decade’s worth of natural disasters. Factoring in harder-to-measure impacts may double that, he said.
