Green Options

I need to be very careful in what I say about this topic because it would be easy to scare people beyond what is rational.  I could also also easily make enemies in the Wheat industry which is about the last thing I’d like to do.  I’m going to try to hit the right balance, but it is risky.

Mycotoxins

Most people don’t know that Mycotoxins are a very real issue in our food supply.  These are nasty, natural chemicals that are produced by certain fungi that infect crops. This is not something new.  In Medieval times there was a wide-spread neurological disorder called “Ergotism.” It was caused by mycotoxins in the rye crop produced by a disease called “ergot.” The poor people who lived off of rye, rather than wheat, were disproportionately effected.

Mycotoxins are still an issue today.  2009 has been a particularly bad year for a toxin called “vomitoxin” in wheat, barley and pasta wheat.  Its not a secret, but unless you read the farm press or trade news, you would never know.  Sometime do a Google News search for “vomitoxin.”  If there is rain when these grains are flowering, they can become infected with a fungus called Fusarium graminierum. The disease starts by reducing the farmer’s yields, but it can also produce a toxin in the remaining grain called deoxynivalenol (more commonly called DON toxin).  The trade term, “vomitoxin,” comes from the physical response that animals have if they are fed too much of this contaminated grain (which is obviously not pretty).

Dr. Norman Borlaug passed away this weekend at 95.  He left behind an amazing legacy of contribution to humanity.  It is likely that he saved more human lives than any other person in history.  He did it by developing far more productive wheat than had ever been grown.  His “short stature” wheat had shorter, thicker stems so that it could hold bigger heads of grain that would otherwise “lodge” (collapse over on to the ground where it can’t be harvested).  It was also resistant to the devastating wheat disease called “Stem Rust.”  This wheat ended up feeding millions of people around the world, particularly in Pakistan and India in the 1960s.  Borlaug’s breakthrough was a key part of the “Green Revolution” and it did much to address the hunger and poverty issues of the time.  For this, and his life-time of additional work Bourlag recieved the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Metal .  Only Martin Luther King, Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa have received all of these commendations.  He was also awarded the National Medal of Science and a host of other awards from around the world.  There is an excellent article about the life and career of this remarkable man in the Des Moines Register.

The chart above shows the historical average yields for wheat and corn in the US.  Note that until the 1930s the relative yields of the crops were similar and were not changing.  After that time yields of both crops began to rise steadily, but corn yields have grown at a much faster pace.  What explains this difference?

There are several interacting factors behind this, and they work together to create the “orphan” status of wheat as a crop.  Corn is a hybrid crop which enhances its yield and the ease of increasing its yield through breeding.  Wheat is harder to hybridize so it isn’t practical except for extremely high yielding wheat areas like Northern Europe.  Instead, US wheat is largely a “saved seed crop” meaning that the grower can simply save back some of the grain and replant it rather than needing to buy new hybrid seed each year.  That system is workable, particularly if the grower periodically buys some “certified seed” to have a purer stand and to take advantage of breeding improvements.  The down-side of a “saved seed crop” is that there is not a very big private seed industry to invest in the crop.  Most of the breeding is done by University and USDA breeder supported by tax dollars and there is a small private industry as well.  As I said in the previous post, these breeders have done a remarkable job with the resources they have, but in an increasingly ag-unaware society, that support is never generous.

I read an article today about a major shortfall in the Kenyan wheat harvest that will drive the need for major imports to meet food needs.  There were three major factors behind this disappointing harvest.  Tight credit and high energy prices kept some growers from even planting.  The rains were not well timed to achieve good yields.  Also a new strain of a very serious wheat disease, UG99 Stem Rust, further reduced yields.

This news has nudged me to write a series of posts about wheat because as a crop, it has a lot more problems than one bad harvest in Kenya.  The Kenya example just stands as an example of the vulnerability of this extremely important world food crop-a crop that is really an “orphan” in today’s agricultural scene.

Celiac Disease is one of the most common, undiagnosed genetic disorders with an estimated 1 in 133 people, or 2 million people, afflicted with the disease in the United States alone (figures cited from here and here).  Persons of Irish, English, and other Anglo backgrounds tend to be more prone to the disease than those of other ethnic backgrounds.

This disease is not a food allergy, but an auto-immune disorder that people do not grow out of over time.  The results of this disorder vary widely by individual, and can range from mild to severe, even requiring hospitalization.

by Lester R. Brown

In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.

As noted in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

Last month, Canada, the United States, and Australia announced unprecedented plans to join forces and commercialize genetically-engineered wheat, saying that biotechnology was crucial to the future of the wheat industry. The National Farmers Union of Canada, however, immediately refuted the tri-country claim, pointing out “the overwhelming majority of farmers in Canada are still opposed to the introduction of genetically-modified wheat.”

On June 1, fifteen organizations across Canada, the United States and Australia publicly confirmed that opposition with the release of “A Definitive Global Rejection of Genetically Engineered Wheat“, a powerful document speaking out against biotech wheat.

But the battle against GM wheat is not a simple one, nor is it restrained to select countries.

Over the course of a lifetime, the average American consumes over 87,000 slices of bread.  Yes, you read that correctly — eighty seven thousand. That’s more than a loaf per week per person, not counting the additional 5,000 hot dog buns and 12,000 hamburger buns each American devours in his or her life.

All that wheat calculates out to a lifetime grand total of 21,947 loaves and buns.  The National Geographic Society’s Human Footprint project has illustrated this shocking bread obsession in a stunning visual (see the video clip below).   In the words of my little brother, who is no stranger to wheatless ways,  “That is a totally nasty amount of bread.”

There’s no argument that bread is an American staple.  Amber waves of grain are, after all, an American icon.  But we can’t live by bread alone.  So what are some wheatless alternatives?

We’ve talked a lot about genetically modified crops here at Eat. Drink. Better — the ongoing battle in the EU over Monsanto’s MON-810 maize, Obama’s refusal to halt genetic engineering in the US sugar-beet industry, and the politics behind it all.

But one frankenfood we haven’t discussed is wheat. Why? Well, mainly because it doesn’t exist.  There simply aren’t any commercially-available strains of genetically modified wheat available.

The United States, Canada, and Australia want to change that.  In an unprecedented joint statement released yesterday, top wheat organizations from the three countries announced that they intend to “work toward the goal of synchronized commercialization of biotech traits in our wheat crops…we believe it is in all of our best interests to introduce biotech wheat varieties in a coordinated fashion.”

In Kenya there’s a quiet disaster happening, and it’s reaching epidemic proportions …

In a new report, the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) says the events of recent months clearly indicate that production of corn ethanol is not a major driving factor behind the continued high food prices at the supermarket.

In the report, “Will the Plunge in Grain Prices Mean Lower Food Prices at the Supermarket?,” the RFA points out that, while prices for agricultural staple commodities such as corn, wheat, and soybeans have all plummeted by about 50% in the last half year, food prices at the grocery store have remained highly elevated. At the same time, ethanol production has dramatically increased.

When the above factors are taken together, the link between grocery store food prices and corn ethanol production becomes dubious. Not only that, and also somewhat unintuitively, it seems that the diversion of relatively large portions of the US corn crop to ethanol production has very little effect on even the market price of corn.