Plants, Not People, May Fall Prey To The Next Global Pandemic
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
Even with all the advancements, such as a potpourri of Roundup Ready crops and Bt corn, that have taken place within the biotech realm, the actual germplasm base for the primary commercial crops remains extremely narrow. The problem today is the same as it was in 1970: commercial varieties are bred first for yield.
Agricologist Miguel Altieri, a professor emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley, issued this ominous warning: “I think we have all the conditions for a pandemic in agricultural systems to occur.”
What is interesting is how little credence both private and public sectors give to the risk of such a COVID-like crop event actually happening. What’s even scarier is that it doesn’t even have to occur naturally. Instead, it could be an act of biological terrorism with global implications.
One would think if the USDA can allocate $3.1 billion for grants on learning how to grow climate-smart commodities, preserving genetic diversity would be a key part of that objective. Not so much. Yes, there have been initiatives such as the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s GEM (Germplasm Enhancement of Maize) project. Started in 1993, GEM is a cooperative effort between public and private entities to widen the germplasm base of commercial hybrid corn. Then, you have the Wheat Genetics Resource Center at Kansas State University. It maintains a gene bank for various wheat species from around the world.
Sadly, the funding for initiatives such as these is pennies on the dollar compared with all the money currently going toward climate change and carbon sequestration. The allocation of resources needs to become more balanced sooner rather than later. Plus, genetic diversity should be included as one of the vital topics of discussion in the upcoming farm bill debate.
Why This is Important
Remember this statistic — 58 days. At the beginning of this year, the global ending stocks for wheat was pegged at 58 days of use if you take China out of the picture — the lowest number since 2007. Add a global or regional plant pandemic to the short supply, and the chaos would make COVID-19 look like a cakewalk. Now is the time to prioritize and prepare. Tomorrow might just be too late.
