[scalio]

I recently read Biodiversos by Stefano Mancuso and Carlo Petrini, the founder of the slow food movement. It's basically a discussion between the two where they lay out the big problems with our production and consumption of food.

For instance, concentrating on making single kinds as productive as possible instead of cultivating variety is extremely dangerous, as shown by this event. The great Irish famine is maybe the most striking example. Humanity does exactly that with wheat, cows, almost everything. The very basis of most of the globe's food comes from a handful of species. In my mind, this is one of the great ticking bombs of our close future.

[Retric]

I don’t know about dangerous.

We have a wide range of crops and the loss of a single one is only ever a regional problem. The loss of any one crop be that something minor like strawberries or major like corn is just not that big a deal globally.

Now locally yea it can be a huge issue, but the tradeoff of lower productivity every year vs the low odds in any one year of a problem make this fairly complex balancing act.

[scalio]

The problem is that the same crops are grown globally, so once a disease grabs hold, it can spread very quickly, eradicating yields globally.

[Moru]

Google Banana fungus. We don't have a wide range of crops. We have monoculture and a very small set of GMO crops that is used all over the world. For example there is a lot of different rice species but we eat mabe five of them in western countries.

[Retric]

Let’s assume the worldwide Banana outpdrops to zero in one day. That’s bad, but not what I would call dangerous.

In terms of the food supply, their are several major food crops that are important wheat, corn, rice, soy etc so the loss of a major one would be very bad, but the worldwide food surplus is so mind blowingly vast it would not nessisarily result in starvation for anyone beyond possibly the farmers directly affected in the 3rd world.

And frankly next year you can generally plant something else.