Rust in the bread basket
economist.com
economist.com
People who point out that it is in fact high yield & high risk, tend to be accused of being anti-progress luddites.
There are ways to deal with systemic risk. I think the best defense is to simply stockpile 2+ years of food for every person in the US by saving a portion of the increased yield.
EX: Wide scale contamination of the food supply, War etc.
Before the green revolution there were a lot of very different wheat varieties around the world. In fact, if my memory is correct, during the selective breeding for high yields one of the breakthroughs came from a thick and sturdy stalked dwarf wheat from Japan. The stalk genes it had produced a stalk strong enough to carry the new large yields.
The point being, we used to have a large variety of geno and phenotype around the world, and now we don't.
Ah, but you are not identifying new risks. The risks are obvious.... IF you think that way. It's almost a politicaly argument, where some people are just convinced there is no systemic risk. To others is it obvious. I don't know why this has become such a polarized topic.
But the result is people who talk about systemic risk are often accused of being luddites. As if their view is not based on facts but on politics.
The alternative itself is also obvious, it is to grow a large variety of wheat strains. This however would reduce yields. And it seems that most societies prefer to bear the systemic risk... for now.
The preference for systemic risk might be political. Because there's still a lot of hungry people in the world, because farm lobbies like mono-culture, it may even be a rational preference for all I know.
Could infection of the 5 largest wheat-producing countries be done maliciously? If the disease is fungal in nature, what's to stop Joe Terrorist from hopping over to mainland USA or AUS and injecting a few dozen crops, and letting it spread from there over the next 5 years? Can anybody speak to this?
Sure, it could be done, perhaps pretty trivially (from the article it sounds like you'd have to do it when the climate is wet enough), but the US dependence on wheat is more ... say cultural than essential. We produce a lot of other grains, e.g. in my home area of SW Missouri in addition to wheat we produce a lot of dent corn and "milo" (grain sorghum), the latter two for animal fodder. Elsewhere there's a lot of rice grown (e.g. my mom grew up on a Louisiana long grain rice farm).
We've always had the option of "gearing down" and shifting some of the grain from animals to people. Nowadays with something like 1/3 of our corn crop going to ethanol fuel production we're in great shape, at least in terms of being able to provide everyone enough calories.
I hope you like cornbread ^_^.
Seriously, go to this page: http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=5...
Select the US, Production Quantity, year(s) and the grains you're interested in and you'll see as of 2008 that we produced 4.5 times as much corn as we did wheat.