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THE UNITED NATIONS warned today of the potential “massive destruction” of the world’s banana crop if a disease affecting the most popular variety spreads from Asia to Africa and the Middle East.
The disease is “posing a serious threat to production and export” of bananas, the fourth most important food crop for the world’s least developed countries, the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a statement.
Fazil Dusunceli, a plant pathologist at FAO, said:
Countries need to act now if we are to avoid the worst-case scenario, which is massive destruction of much of the world’s banana crop.
Gianluca Gondolini, secretary of the World Banana Forum, said it could hurt “employment and government revenues in many tropical countries”.
Panama disease
The TR4 strain of Panama disease, which is one of the world’s most destructive and affects the Cavendish variety – the most popular in global exports.
FAO said it had already caused significant losses over the last two decades in Southeast Asia and cases had recently been reported in Jordan and Mozambique.
It has not yet affected top global exporters such as Colombia or Ecuador.
The disease is soil-borne and the fungus can remain viable for decades and is not dangerous to humans.
The FAO said there was a need for more monitoring, prevention and training for farm workers, including measures to avoid movement of infected soil and planting materials into and out of farms.
If the Irish Govt are giving you advice on anything Internet related then you really do have problems.
Especially seeing as the same government were still using Windows Xp despite it being discontinued, I think that particular failure cost the taxpayer €3.5 million.
“The Government is thinking” – I stopped reading after that silly line.
No doubt they’ll introduce an Internet tax to pay for it.
Just send all your usernames and passwords to the relevant department.
Don’t they have them already.
The government won’t be happy until they have full control of the Internet, way to free for them at the moment.
All those Facebook videos of guards beating people up and people saying they are sh!t on this site must do the powers that be heads in.
It’s driving the powers that be nuts that there is something they can’t control.
The Internet has aided in exposing corruption and tranny. But at the same time has given them a tool for spying and keeping tabs on the public.
A few lads I know have been caught out cross dressing on the internet….
Corruption and transsexuality go hand in hand in many governments
Should read :
“The Government Is Thinking Up New Ways To Hack You”
:)
You are okay there, government – I’ll control my own information, if you don’t mind.
The same government who helped setup Irish Water, a company which they gave carte blanche powers to violate every part of the data protection act to track every citizen and all of their personal information in this country, and even after spending €80 million on consultants still ended up sending bills to dead people now want to give us advice on how not to get our data stolen online? Oh the sweet irony.
Is €80mn the final Bill?
The sub text to this article is control , but let’s start small and the government is doing it to protect you .
“It’s a great place for free speech, and so that must be protected, but in a way that is acceptable in the eyes of reasonable people.”
Now…what other asshat pocket stuffing politician coined the ‘reasonable people’ phrase…….I take it the ‘reasonable people’ are only those who agree with the Government and everyone else are ‘unreasonable people’ even if they are in the majority.
There appears to be 2 terms missing in this article .. “Snowden” and “encryption security” .. Ignoring Snowden for a moment (people usually do btw) , the degrading of encryption protection from the “Five Eyes” network and their political masters/slaves is a major stumbling block to stopping “hackers” and “other agencies” from attacking electronic networks.
Encrypted emails services are now illegal in Spain, The UK, China, North Korea and this is gaining ground in many other countries.
Snowden advised that people have password phrases, otherwise their passwords could be easily hacked in seconds..
Snowden also talked of the security apparatus being designed for attack and not defence (because of backdoors and encryption busting techniques.
Point is that if the governments can do it so can any half trained computer technician..
Using the war on terror to degrade our human rights (ie privacy) is not a good excuse, in fact, it plays into the hands of the terrorists and sends a chilling effect to the rest of the population.
Google Stasi techniques and consequences in east germany. And then put the surveillance apparatus now in place in the mix. I Hope that we dont have the wrong people get into power.. that might be very scary.
And lastly .. In an age of such surveillance techniques, If Ireland was invaded it would take an enemy about 1 hour to have a list of all possible AND FUTUREthreats against them (the wonders of technology) and we have no protections..
Snowden worked for a private company with access to all you phone calls and emails going back years.. And your childrens for that matter..
Too late… lol.
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