Peasant Agriculture Is Not Enough

via Naomiklein.orghttp://www.naomiklein.org/main

As Naomi Klein has so ably dissected in her book The Shock Doctrine, disaster capitalism has learned how to maximize profit during periods of social crisis. If necessary, these same disaster capitalists (people like Dick Cheney, with his deep ties to Halliburton), will engineer crisis' in order to move additional wealth into their (and their corporation's) pockets. This is one of the reasons that the modern corporation can be seen as psychopathic: what to normal sane human beings seems like horror and destruction (places such as Haiti, Iraq, and Afghanistan) are seen by disaster capital as opportunities to be created and then exploited. Particularly if public money can be funnelled into their private profits.
it is not new thinking that communities in crisis---crisis such as war or natural disaster or other such upheavals--are communities which are vulnerable. Simply imagining or remembering a crisis in your own family and extrapolating out to a city, country or social grouping should display the degree of vulnerability these communities experience. But what happens when the crisis is planetary?

via Mother Jones

Global warming, or global climate change, is such a crisis. But because it is so slow moving (like an avalanche, it starts slow and build up size and power as it continues), we're having trouble recognizing it. And because the initial effects are felt most in the developing world, we in the developed world (by virtue of our institutionalized alienation from the natural world) can choose to avoid and ignore the first overhangs of snow breaking loose and starting down the mountainside.
Currently, farming is in crisis. A recent Bloomberg article remarked:

The global food system will remain “vulnerable” in the years to come as a growing population boosts demand for crops and climate change makes weather disruption more frequent, according to the World Bank. 

Wheat. The Dominant Grain Just Gets Better

Wheat is one of the dominant grains grown on this planet, and most traditional cuisines have been forced to adopt it into themselves. Wheat opened up the Canadian west, allowing the prairie provinces to become the "breadbasket of the world" back in the middle of the last century. Wheat is one of the heavyweights, no doubt.
Now, wheat's just got a shot in the arm--improved salt tolerance. The University of Adelaide announced on Monday 12 March 2012:

A team of Australian scientists involving the University of Adelaide has bred salt tolerance into a variety of durum wheat that shows improved grain yield by 25% on salty soils.
Using 'non-GM' crop breeding techniques, scientists from CSIRO Plant Industry have introduced a salt-tolerant gene into a commercial durum wheat, with spectacular results shown in field tests. Researchers at the University of Adelaide's Waite Research Institute have led the effort to understand how the gene delivers salinity tolerance to the plants.
The research is the first of its kind in the world to fully describe the improvement in salt tolerance of an agricultural crop - from understanding the function of the salt-tolerant genes in the lab, to demonstrating increased grain yields in the field.

This is actually important news. A significant part of the world's soils have a high salinity. And irrigated soil sees its salinity rise also. This latter could be addressed with better soil management practices, but the drive toward repeated cropping without fallow periods means that much of our land will continue to degrade. And if its being irrigated, its salinity will increase.
Domestication and breeding has narrowed the gene pool of modern wheat, leaving it susceptible to problems with saline soils. But early wheat cultivars had better resistance to salty soils. The researchers at U Adelaide used conventional breeding to move the salt-tolerant gene (TmHKT1;5-A) into a modern cultivar. By using traditional practices, rather than modern gene splicing, means that the new variety will be able to be planted anywhere without concerns or resistance being raised.
The salt-tolerant durum wheat shows no yield-penalty from the breeding. Yields remain about the same under normal planting conditions, and show as much as 25% increased yield in salty conditions. Which means that the new variety will be able to be sown uniformly in a field, regardless of whether or not there are patches of saltier soil.

Dr James, who led the field trials, says: "While most studies only look at performance under controlled conditions in a laboratory or greenhouse, this is the first study to confirm that the salt-tolerant gene increases yields on a farm with saline soils.

The researchers have taken the next step and have bred the salt-tolerance gene into wheat cultivars used for making bread.