文档介绍：Agriculture, Biosecurity, Nutrition
and Consumer Protection Department
Food and anization
of the United Nations
Protecting the pollinators
Farmers have long considered pollination as one of nature’s many “free
services”. But all that is now changing...
In the early 1960s, a multinational pany
started plantations of West African oil palms in
Malaysia, hoping to fill a growing global market
for palm oil. The plants thrived, but had one
serious problem: they produced little fruit
because pollen from the palm's male flowers
often failed to reach its female flowers.
While plantation management reverted to
laborious and costly pollination by hand,
researchers discovered that in the oil palm's
native Cameroon the plant's male flowers host a
weevil, Elaeidobius kamerunicus, that feeds on
the flowers' pollen. When the female flowers are
ready for fecundation, they release a scent that
attracts the tiny beetle - and its thick cloak of
male DNA. After careful screening and
quarantine, the weevil was introduced to looming "pollination crisis", the United Nations
Malaysia's oil palm plantations in 1981. Result: Convention on Biological Diversity established in
the cost of pollination fell to virtually zero and 2002 an International Initiative for the
fruit production rose from 13 million tonnes to Conservation and Sustainable Use of