key: cord-0852348-8g3ddpo5
authors: Grünwald, Niklaus J.
title: Entering the international year of fruits and vegetables: tradeoffs between food production and the environment
date: 2021-01-15
journal: CABI Agric Biosci
DOI: 10.1186/s43170-021-00023-0
sha: 5391d69d875e73c75786281d3c792d76c3799537
doc_id: 852348
cord_uid: 8g3ddpo5

nan

As we leave 2020 behind, "the coronavirus lockdown has inspired a surge in gardening not seen since the second world war" (The Economist 2020). While in the Western World COVID-19 inspired gardening, the United Nations have made fruits and vegetables an important component of their messaging. In 2021, we are entering the United Nations' Year of Fruits and Vegetables with a renewed enthusiasm for gardening. Fruits and vegetable now make up about 22% of food production globally (Fig. 1) .

Global food production has increased from 6.1 billion tons in 2000 to 9 billion tons in 2018 (Fig. 1 ). Our need to feed a growing world population competes with limited resources and provides an environmental impact (Poore and Nemecek 2018). Global food production depletes water resources, degrades global ecosystems, and exacerbates climate change (Foley et al. 2011; Godfray et al. 2010) .

CABI Agriculture and Bioscience provides a new venue for rapid dissemination of scientific information to address these pressing global problems in agriculture, forestry, and the environments. The journal aims to contribute to solving pressing global issues while facilitating food security. For example, we published a seminal study on the use of antibiotics in low and middle-income countries based on recommendations by agricultural pesticide advisors (Taylor and Reeder 2020) . One highlight from this study is that antibiotics are being recommended far more frequently and on a much greater variety of crops than previously thought. Three articles published in (Heide et al. 2020) , and sugar partitioning and metabolism in sweet sorghum (Tovignan et al. 2020) . Some further articles focus on plant health such as scab susceptibility of pecan fruit in a native pecan collection in the USA (Bock et al. 2020) , novel sources of resistance to apple scab in Malus germplasm (Papp et al. 2020), the role of passive surveillance and citizen science in plant health (Brown et al. 2020) , the effect of fungal, oomycete and nematode interactions on apple root development in replant soil (Tilston et al. show that treatment with colony stimulating factor 2 provides protection to a proportion of blastocysts from cryodamage caused by vitrification (Sosa et al. 2020) , whilst Penrith reviews the current status of African swine fever, a serious viral disease of domestic pigs and Eurasian wild boars, which is posing a major threat to pig production (Penrith 2020). CABI Agriculture and Bioscience currently has four concurrent thematic issues in progress including: Disease of tree fruit and nut crops; New approaches to economic impact assessments of non-native pests, pathogens and weeds; Eradication of arthropods: science and society; and Recent advances on sustainable management of arthropod pests in African fruit cropping systems.

The Editorial Board of CABI Agriculture and Bioscience has grown to a total of 112 editors, located across all continents, and the journal now includes 19 sections spanning a large range of disciplines, from agroecology to the social sciences. We recently introduced a cohort of Regional Editors-in-Chief currently representing North America, South America, South Asia and Asia Pacific. We will be continuing to recruit further Regional Editors-in-Chief, Section Editors and Associate Editors for our Board in the coming year. 

Foliage and fruit susceptibility of a pecan provenance collection to scab, caused by Venturia effusa

The role of passive surveillance and citizen science in plant health

Solutions for a cultivated planet

Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion people

Temperature control of shoot growth and floral initiation in apple

Determinants of survival of the bovine blastocyst to cryopreservation stress: treatment with colony stimulating factor 2 during the Morula-to-blastocyst transition and embryo sex

Antibiotic use on crops in low and middle-income countries based on recommendations made by agricultural advisors

The Economist. 2020. America rediscovers the joys of vegetable-growing

Effect of fungal, oomycete and nematode interactions on apple root development in replant soil

Terminal drought effect on sugar partitioning and metabolism is modulated by leaf stay-green and panicle size in the stem of Sweet Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench)

Safeguarding and using global banana diversity: a holistic approach

World Food and Agriculture-Statistical Yearbook 2020