保护授粉者（英文版）学术报告.pdfVIP

Agriculture, Biosecurity, Nutrition and Consumer Protection Department Food and Agriculture Organization 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 food company 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 palms 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 palms native Cameroon the plants 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 Malaysias 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 Pollinators 23 million within five years. within its work programme on agricultural Elaeidobius kamerunicus is just one of an biodiversity. As coordinator of that initiative, estimated 100,000 species of insects, birds and FAO is now preparing a UNEP/GEF project mammals that mediate the sexual reproduction aimed at filling very large gaps in the knowledge of most of the worlds flowering plants -