Why the heck isn't this bigger news??

[dianeduane]

It's not quite like finding yourself stuck in the plot of No Blade of Grass. But bad enough.

Billions at risk from wheat super-blight

An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn't going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn't interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren't prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.

The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it.

...Argh.

Comments

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

Didn't someone do a StarTrek novel about this...? (I'm pretty sure it wasn't you or Peter, though. You two don't tend to put sex in yours.)

[starkruzr.livejournal.com]

Sex is connected to grain... how?

... wait. Do I even want to know? o_O

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

Interspecies sex at that. Nubile Federation scientist is 'under the protection of' Commander Kang. It's called Pawns and Symbols. A read-once, not a read-many.

[starkruzr.livejournal.com]

It sounds like fanfic. :p

Not that there's anything wrong with interspecies romance, but it just sounds very ... typical, if you know what I mean.

[txvoodoo.livejournal.com]

Thank god I'm not the only one who thought of that novel and knew which one it was. My ST geekdom would have been beyond beyondness, if that had be so ;)

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

The message to take away, BTW, is applicable to the afore-mentioned blight:

Crop diversity and hybrid vigor are our friends.