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posted by martyb on Monday October 03 2016, @01:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-want-[endangered]-fries-with-that? dept.

Some of our favorite foods and drinks could be considered "endangered" because the places where they are grown are being severely impacted by climate change. If this isn't proof that we need to do something about climate change, I don't know what is. To start off, here are a few foods that are part of our every lives that might not be around for long.

  • Coffee
  • Chocolate
  • Beer
  • Maple Syrup
  • Seafood: Lobsters and Salmon
  • Peanut Butter
  • Potatoes

What can we do about it?

Some farmers and researchers have started looking into bringing back ancient or near-extinct crops that might be better suited for this new reality.

Amaranth is one example. Once considered a sacred grain by the Aztec, amaranth was banned by the Spanish because it was used in sacrificial ceremonies.

[...] Cultivated in Ethiopia for more than 7,000 years, the enset plant is known as the "false banana" because of its similarity to the banana tree. It can withstand heavy drought and heavy rain, making it a plant that can naturally withstand climate change. [It] produces two times more food per unit of land than cereal crops.

[...] While most plants making a comeback are known for being drought resistant and having a high tolerance for heat, other plants (like taro) can be grown in flooded areas, a concern for rising sea levels in Asia and other parts of the world.

[...] Some believe that [...] seed banks are the best way to prepare for climate change. John Torgrimson, executive director of the Seed Savers Exchange in the United States, told Truthout that "while not every traditional variety tastes great or looks great, its genetics may be invaluable 50 or 100 years from now when the climate is different. There are qualities in varieties that we don't even know about. It might be resistant to a particular disease; it may grow well in a particular region; it may have certain traits that will allow us to deal with climactic conditions going forward. Diversity is an insurance policy".


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  • (Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Monday October 03 2016, @11:20PM

    by Non Sequor (1005) on Monday October 03 2016, @11:20PM (#409726) Journal

    Is mercantilism, specifically in terms of attempting to marshal national production towards servicing national needs, due for a comeback?

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 04 2016, @08:35AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @08:35AM (#409873) Journal
    It might, though it's worth noting that it's never really gone away. The Common Agricultural Policy in the EU came from a post-WWII desire to ensure domestic food production was enough in case of trade blockades. The problem is the same as any centrally planned economy: it's difficult to make it flexible and able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. One of the big advantages the west had over the Soviets was the ability for individual sectors of a loosely coupled economy to fail, allowing the entire thing to adapt. That said, with high-speed communication, it might be possible to construct a distributed system controlling production that has a desired set of emergent properties. It's likely that such a system would end up looking very like a market with subsidies though and it's not clear that it would necessarily be able to adapt the subsidies any faster than in current systems: the bottleneck is the speed of government, not of technology.
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