However, with the overall strategy on biosecurity now being delayed until the Task Force produces its final report in spring 2013, fears remain that the government is still not acting quickly enough to reduce the vulnerability of our forests.
As I highlighted in my previous blogpost, in light of the challenges posed, not least by the increasingly international trade in trees, the scientific community is calling for far more radical controls on biosecurity, with some tree specialists suggesting quarantine for trees such as oak and pine, and a total ban on imports where necessary.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Forestry Commission already knows enough about these increasing risks to realise that efforts to strengthen biosecurity must now be stepped up.
Together with these improvements in biosecurity and funding to match, we must also look to build greater resilience in UK woodland.
The industry group said it hoped the combination of improved biosecurity on farms, new methods in the slaughterhouse and new technologies would help reduce the level of campylobacter in chickens over time.
Smithfield does not let journalists in, for reasons of "biosecurity".
Reducing this further would hardly threaten the nation's "biosecurity".
In defending "biosecurity", governments have tended to react defensively to diseases like the H5N1 bird flu and mad-cow disease (or BSE), disrupting not just bilateral trade but international markets as well.
They propose an Intergovernmental Panel on Biological Safety along the lines of the IPCC to improve biosecurity; they also suggest boosting the G20 by giving it a secretariat and getting national security chiefs together.Many of these ideas may go nowhere; national sovereignty is hugely resilient.
In the early 20th century, after rich countries instituted biosecurity regimes, the growth rates slowed, and in America, at least until recently, remained fairly linear.
But there is no action plan to raise standards more systematically.If there were, says Ms Smithson, more effort and urgency might go into biosafety and biosecurity.
