Commodity Prices - Wheat out of Reach?
Right before Thanksgiving, The New Yorker had a piece about food security. The main argument was that the marketization of agriculture exacerbated food shortages as prices reached their peak earlier this year.
As discussion about the current global economic crisis continue, and individuals make New Year’s resolutions, it is important to keep the vital importance of food security in mind. One of the world’s most successful aid agencies arose out of necessity in response to manmade famine (MSF’s story). International aid should be a targeted, crisis-response mechanism; when these organizations have to set up camp for years due to diminishing government expenditures on food security, the alarm should be going off in our heads.
How do we ensure the food security of the world’s poorest, as well as our own in the US? Well, moving away from triumphal monoculture would be a step in the right direction. Most of us remember learning that Irish immigration to the U.S. in the mid-1800s was a result of the Potato Famine; but why were people starving? A great site from UC Berkeley explains the cause explicitly:
In the 1800s, the Irish solved their problem of feeding a growing population by planting potatoes. Specifically, they planted the “lumper” potato variety. And since potatoes can be propagated vegetatively, all of these lumpers were clones, genetically identical to one another…The Irish potato clones were certainly low on genetic variation, so when the environment changed and a potato disease swept through the country in the 1840s, the potatoes (and the people who depended upon them) were devastated.
The article also reminds us of the dangers of overlooking this and other instances of monoculture’s blowback:
Despite the warnings of evolution and history, much agriculture continues to depend on genetically uniform crops…Planting genetically uniform crops increases the risk of “losing it all” when environmental variables change: for example, if a new pest is introduced or rainfall levels drop.
These pests include a fungus that may wipe out the now-common Cavendish banana, but the problem gets more serious as we think of wheat stem rust. One NYT Op-Ed implores us to continue funding research into stem-resist wheat varieties. Ug99, named because it manifested in Uganda in 1999, is a real threat that may affect wheat stocks worldwide.
Pretty sobering stuff, but certainly worth looking into.
Additional Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_security
http://www.foodsecurity.org/
http://www.fao.org/spfs/en/
http://www.globalrust.org/
http://www.cimmyt.org/gis/rustmapper/RustMapper_Web.html
