Pest Management in the Postharvest Agricultural Supply Chain Under Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is a danger to the agricultural system and will impact the availability of food to feed the world. While much attention has focused on the effects of climate change on pest management prior to harvest, much less attention and time has been devoted to determining the effects of climate change on pest management in the postharvest supply chain from farm to fork. Climate change may percolate to pest management at a macro level through compositional changes in which species attack commodities through distributional changes or what commodities are grown in a region (and thus processed in that area). However, climate change may also result in altered microclimates at food facilities, which can be tied to increased generation times, elevated damage and contamination potential, greater abundance of species, and greater need for external inputs. A variety of integrated pest management (IPM) strategies may help increase the resiliency and adaptation of management to climate change. Tactics susceptible to warming temperature changes in climate showing decreased efficacy include semiochemical-based, behaviorally-based tactics, a subset of insecticides (e.g., pyrethrins and pyrethroids), and those that rely on low temperature (e.g., grain aeration, grain chilling). Tactics at food facilities showing resilience to warming temperature changes in climate include packaging, other groups of insecticides, and likely sanitation. Data gaps include predicting changing distributions for stored product insects under climate change, translating macro climate changes into microclimate changes at food facilities, and rigorously investigating how IPM tactic efficacy varies under changing climate. Increased scrutiny of how climate change will affect pest management in the postharvest supply chain will deliver improved outcomes for the entire agricultural system.

Farm2Fork through the lens of community ecology: concepts and applications in postharvest storage

“…Although human influences may seem arbitrary and sudden, many processors, elevator managers, and cooperative units have important deadlines, patterns, and thresholds that they operate by and thus, disturbances to ecosystems are somewhat predictable. Other factors such as climate can also be predictable, although extreme events such as drought, flooding, severe weather, and changes in temperature extremes can be less predictable and increasingly so in the future (Gerken and Morrison, 2022). In the future, pest modeling, incorporating niche space, behavioral ecology, climate, and successional factors up to and including timing of grain deterioration and energy transfer are necessary to provide a full estimate and plan for management of pests (Figure 2).…”

“…Furthermore, climate plays an important role in the development, ecology, and physiology of stored product insect pests (Arbogast and Mullen, 1987). Although microclimates may exist throughout a facility or packaged good, general climatic conditions in the environment surrounding the commodity can have a significant impact on the survival and control of insect pests (Gerken and Morrison, 2022). Thermal preferences among different species can drive population growth rates and ultimately the number of populations that can be produced within each growing season.…”

“…Monitoring insects in the face of a changing climate requires a team effort to gather spatially large, long-term datasets. In addition, prediction involves a multidisciplinary approach, with thermal preferences, behavior, genetic variation, ecology, and physiology all key players in development of risk models (White, 1992;Gerken and Morrison, 2022).…”

“…For instance, once one knows how a disturbance impacts a population or ecosystem parameter it is targeting, one can model it, and understand how it may vary under conditions that are hard to simulate in the laboratory. This may bring a new, more comprehensive picture about the fundamental and applied biology of stored product insects to the fore, especially in the light of pressing issues such as climate change (Gerken and Morrison, 2022).…”

The Fall Armyworm and Larger Grain Borer Pest Invasions in Africa: Drivers, Impacts and Implications for Food Systems

“…Recent evidence shows poleward shifts in species for more benign environments as climate warming persists [126]. As global mean temperatures and variability increases, the threat of invasive insect species will increase as tropical and subtropical insects expand their range into more temperate areas [128,129].…”