The Biodiversity World Tour is a global campaign to engage citizens from around the world in a discussion on how agriculture can protect and preserve our natural resources.
The buzz about the disappearance of bees continues – it’s a frenzy of speculation, finger pointing and occasionally, research. Here’s a brief round-up of some recent cyberspace chatter on the subject…
Pesticides are used to kill the bugs and diseases that destroy agricultural crops. These bugs and diseases are part of ‘biodiversity’, the variety that exists between life forms. Paradoxically agriculture needs biodiversity – relies on it in fact. Biodiversity pollinates plants, it purifies water, prevents soil erosion, it even helps control the climate through the sequestration of carbon dioxide. Without biodiversity there would be no agriculture, but left to the mercy of biological diversity, and the hard knocks rule of survival of the fittest (Darwin’s ‘natural selection’) we would struggle to feed ourselves – pests and plant diseases taking food from our mouths.
