by Steve Cubbage, AgWeb.com

We are in the COVID-19 decade. The social, economic and cultural effects of the pandemic will no doubt cast a long, dark shadow into our future. Nothing could be worse than what we just lived through during the past three years, right?

You do know that is a rhetorical question, don’t you? The sobering reality is as follows. Yes, next time it could be worse. And when, not if, there is a next time, it might not be a “people pandemic” like COVID-19 or the Spanish flu outbreak of the early 1900s. Instead, it could be something very different that does not affect people directly but instead preys on the plants that are needed to feed a growing global population.

Although about 300,000 plant species are edible, only a fraction of them are used for human nutrition. Roughly 200 species are regularly consumed, and only three of them–rice, maize (corn) and wheat–provide 60% of the energy in the human diet.

Throw a COVID-like event at one of those three main crops, and you have a global famine on your hands. A situation like this started in Ireland in 1845 and lasted until 1852. That crop-related pandemic became known as the Great Famine or–more specifically–the Irish Potato Famine.

A More Recent Example

Nobody really knows how the fungus Bipolar got into U.S. corn fields. By the summer of 1970, however, it was there with a vengeance and inflicting a disease called Southern corn leaf blight, which causes corn stalks to wither and die. The South got hit first. Then, the disease marched north. It spread through Tennessee and Kentucky before heading up into Illinois, Missouri and Iowa–the heart of the Corn Belt.

The destruction was unprecedented, and the corn harvest of 1970 was reduced by about 15%. Collectively, farmers lost almost 700 million bushels of corn that could have fed livestock and humans–at an economic cost of a billion dollars.

Some “experts” say these events are yesterday’s problems, and we’re smarter and better prepared to deal with whatever challenges the future holds. With advanced seed technologies utilizing artificial intelligence and CRISPR gene editing tools at our fingertips, these “experts” say such doomsday claims are just Chicken Little talking again.

Modern Ag Opens the Door Wider
The greatest Achilles’ heel of the three major crops consumed on this planet is their shallow gene pool that is shared among today’s hybrid varieties.

It was exactly such genetic monotony that paved the way for the corn leaf blight explosion in 1970. The match, however, was lit decades earlier when scientists in the 1930s developed a strain of corn with a genetic quirk that made it a breeze for seed companies to crank out. Farmers liked the strain’s high yields. By the 1970s, that particular variety formed the genetic foundation for up to 90% of the corn grown around the country.

That particular strain of corn–known as cms-T–proved highly susceptible to southern corn leaf blight. So when an unusually warm, wet spring favored the fungus, it had an overabundance of corn plants to devour.

At the time, scientists hoped a lesson had been learned.

“Never again should a major cultivated species be molded into such uniformity that it is so universally vulnerable to attack by a pathogen,” plant pathologist Arnold John Ullstrup wrote in a review of the matter published in 1972.

A Singular Focus

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