Have a Banana, On
Second Thought, Don’t.
“Never out of season” Robert Dunn looks at how modern societies make themselves vulnerable to crop devastation. Robert Dunn, a biologist at North Carolina States University stated that the diseases and pests are threating modern day agriculture, while we have been spared count less time by legions of unsung heroes working across a range of crops. Biological battle rarely makes headline, though when it does usually a story of bad biology or worse economics. While biologist and policy maker try to combat the issue and never to repeat the biological history of Irish potato famine, still with all the cutting edge technology, monoculture and little genetic variation between plants made it more likely that a disease could engulf every single field of crop. Today biologist stare into the abyss of global crop failure and trying to come up with any solution with a problem that would never been solve as long as the big company still run the government office.
Loss of genetic diversity in food crops is catastrophic because it doesn't happen on small scales, with monoculture once crops are hit by a disease or fungus they can't fight then the crop as a whole is basically done for. I recently read in an article about how the past 50 years has been the worst for crop diversity and crops like peas, tomatoes, corn, and beets are really suffering.
ReplyDeleteThis is causing such a decrease in genetic variation in these crops such as bananas and cocoa beans. If a bacteria or microbe attack these plants, they would be wiped away. This has happened before in Ireland with the Irish potato famine.
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