Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Great, Russia’s Crops Just Failed

November 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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While everyone else was worrying about hurricanes, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization quietly published its own news of a disaster, the body's November "Food Outlook" report. It seems Russian wheat production has crashed by 30 percent, owing to freakishly severe droughts, the result of an epic heat wave last summer (remember the horrific Russian wildfires a few months ago?). Fine, 2013 will be a slightly bad year to be a baker, so what? The report explains that part of the problem with a tight market for amber waves of grain is that it also hits cereal production—which ... Read More

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Is the Apple-ocalypse Upon Us? UPDATED

August 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

I’m a big apple guy. So imagine my dismay on Friday when the USDA staged a classic end-of-the-week bad news dump: We’re projected to come up about a billion pounds short of last year’s apple crop--around 3 billion apples, based on the last time I measured out a pound of apples at the store (luckily, it looks like we'll be laying off enough teachers to offset the shortfall). I've reached out to experts at the USDA for further insight, and will update this post if and when I hear back. UPDATE (Tuesday afternoon):  If these apple projections come to fruition, they would represent the ... Read More

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How Norman Borlaug Went With the Grain

March 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

By the end of October 2011, the Earth’s human population had reached 7 billion. It was half that in 1968 when Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. In the book’s opening pages he proclaimed that too many people in the planet’s underdeveloped countries made mass starvation inevitable, that a minimum of 10 million people — “most of them children” — would starve to death every year in the 1970s, and that it was too late to do anything about it. Plenty of experts agreed with Ehrlich; the press ran with the story, it was apocalypse now. Except he was wrong: ... Read More

More like this: Environment, March-April 2012, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Ten Hearty Orphan Crops

July 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
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Ignored orphan crops may help back up world food supplies as problems like wheat rust devastate global monocultures in food crops. Cassava: Cassava, also known as yucca or manioc, is a perennial native to South America. It is grown throughout tropical and subtropical regions, with Nigeria being the world's largest producer. The plant grows up to 15 feet tall and is a food staple for about 500 million people worldwide. The edible parts are the tuberous roots and leaves, which are a major source of carbohydrates. Cassava is the third largest source of carbohydrates in the world. The roots ... Read More

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Rethinking the Sandwich: the Globalization of Wheat Rust

July 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
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For the millions of north Indian wheat farmers, fate really does ride in the winds. A southern wind brings sighs of relief; they know that warm monsoon rains soon will revive their parched fields. But a western wind brings shudders of fear; all are unsure if that breeze carries with it a spore of the potent Ug99 fungus — the fungus that could single-handedly undermine the global food supply. Ten years ago, in the fields of Uganda and Kenya, a mutated strain of the Ug99 fungus, also known as wheat stem rust, successfully overcame the genetic defenses embedded in the local wheat plants, ... Read More

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America’s Food Safety Back on a Front Burner

August 13, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Think IBM and you think food. You don't? Well, for at least the last decade, the pioneering business machine company has been working to track the quality and safety of food, the essential component of the human machine. In February, IBM released new software designed to trace food — using bar codes and scanners — in order to monitor the condition, quality, and location of items, thus preventing or mitigating food-contamination outbreaks. IBM touts its ability to use barcodes and radio frequency identification chips to follow food from "farm to fork." The company described one ... Read More

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