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Monoculture 
Sun Oct 11, 2009 at 09:14:21 AM PDT
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When you visit Iowa, you're nearly guaranteed to see three things: corn, soy beans, and hog confinements. Those were the focus of the field trip I attended yesterday at the Community Food Security Coalition Conference To be totally blunt about it, maybe you've wondered: why are farmers so stupid that they keep growing corn and soybeans year after year? Or corn and corn year after year? And why on earth would anybody stink up their own farm with a hog confinement? And, as you may have guessed, it turns out that the farmers aren't stupid at all. Not one bit. I will explain below. There's also another great question I was asked on a recent visit to Lawrence University. In classic liberal arts professor fashion, one of the professors asked me, "Assuming the farmers are all rational, if they all plant GMOs, then wouldn't that mean that the GMOs are the best choice?" Gooood question. I'll address that below as well.
Welcome to Iowa
If you'd rather watch instead of read, you can view this video of George Naylor describing why GMOs and corporate giants win (thanks to Andrew Kang Bartlett for shooting and sharing the video).
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Tue Mar 24, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT
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I like my friend Natasha's headline so much that I've stolen it. "Wheat: Monoculture Under Predictable Threat." This is a scenario that plays out time and time again in nature. It happened when the Irish relied on one variety of potato, resulting in the Irish Potato Famine. It happened when America lined the streets of every single town with elm trees, and Dutch Elm disease took them out. Nature likes biodiversity, but we humans like simplicity and organization. When we clean up nature's messy genetic diversity, nature tends to come along with a pest or a disease of some sort and show us who's boss by wiping out our ONE variety of whatever species it is.
So, enter wheat. A fungus called stem rust in a variety known as Ug99 is starting in Africa and picking up steam around the world. It was so named because it was found in Uganda in 1999. This article reports that it's already on the move from Iran to Pakistan. Oh - and that Monsanto (how nice of them!) is working on a variety of wheat that will resist the rust.
However, despite their desire to patent the solution, Monsanto might not need to save the day after all. A New York Times blog reports that wheat varieties resistant to Ug99 are already a reality. (I couldn't gather from the article whether the new varieties were genetically modified or not, but it seemed that they were not.)
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