

Rust in the bread basket - roundsquare
http://www.economist.com/node/16481593?story_id=16481593

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Roboprog
Diversify your investments, er, crops, I guess. Monoculture is risky, whether
its Windows, or wheat. Predators and parasites will find a way to get at
things eventually, no matter.

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bh42
Indeed. However, keep in mind the green revolution always has had the PR of
_high yield & low risk_.

People who point out that it is in fact high yield & high risk, tend to be
accused of being anti-progress luddites.

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billswift
It did _not_ increase the risk. At worst, if the article is entirely accurate,
we will simply be returning to where we would otherwise be anyway.

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bh42
Yes it did increase the risk.

Before the green revolution there were a lot of very different wheat varieties
around the world. In fact, if my memory is correct, during the selective
breeding for high yields one of the breakthroughs came from a thick and sturdy
stalked dwarf wheat from Japan. The stalk genes it had produced a stalk strong
enough to carry the new large yields.

The point being, we used to have a large variety of geno and phenotype around
the world, and now we don't.

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greenlblue
I guess it's time to buy some Monsanto stock.

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codingthewheel
Is this a terrorism vector?

Could infection of the 5 largest wheat-producing countries be done
maliciously? If the disease is fungal in nature, what's to stop Joe Terrorist
from hopping over to mainland USA or AUS and injecting a few dozen crops, and
letting it spread from there over the next 5 years? Can anybody speak to this?

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hga
Yes, but not an existential danger.

Sure, it could be done, perhaps pretty trivially (from the article it sounds
like you'd have to do it when the climate is wet enough), but the US
dependence on wheat is more ... say cultural than essential. We produce a lot
of other grains, e.g. in my home area of SW Missouri in addition to wheat we
produce a lot of dent corn and "milo" (grain sorghum), the latter two for
animal fodder. Elsewhere there's a lot of rice grown (e.g. my mom grew up on a
Louisiana long grain rice farm).

We've always had the option of "gearing down" and shifting some of the grain
from animals to people. Nowadays with something like 1/3 of our corn crop
going to ethanol fuel production we're in great shape, at least in terms of
being able to provide everyone enough calories.

I hope you like cornbread ^_^.

Seriously, go to this page:
[http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=5...](http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=567#ancor)

Select the US, Production Quantity, year(s) and the grains you're interested
in and you'll see as of 2008 that we produced 4.5 times as much corn as we did
wheat.

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codingthewheel
Thanks. Just the sort of info I was looking for. +1

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MaysonL
Obligatory classic SF reference:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass> (quite a good novel, IIRC,
although it's been a few decades).

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pragmatic
How is this hacker news?

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bosch
Quite simply they'll have to 'hack' together a cure or a solution to this
obviously potentially big problem.

