Stories tagged famine

Brown plant hopper endangers world rice supply

World famine prevention: ID#6901
Courtesy CDC/ Dr. Lyle Conrad Rice is a crop that feeds nearly half the world’s people. The International Rice Research Institute is the world’s main repository of rice seeds as well as genetic and other information about rice. In the 1980s, the institute employed five entomologists, or insect experts, overseeing a staff of 200. Now it has one entomologist with a staff of eight.

"A potential solution is at hand for the plant hopper problem. No fewer than 14 new types of genetic resistance have been discovered. But with the budget cuts, the institute has mounted no effort to breed these traits into widely used rice varieties.

Doing so now would take four to seven years, if money could be found. In the meantime, the hoppers have become a growing threat. China, the world’s biggest rice producer, announced on May 7 that it was struggling to control the rapid spread of the insects there. A plant hopper outbreak can destroy 20 percent of a harvest; China is trying to hold losses to 5 percent in affected fields."

Green Revolution stops starvation in 1960s

In the 1960s, population growth was far outrunning food production. With many poor countries threatened by famine, money was devoted to agricultural research. With new varieties of corn, wheat, and rice, along with better growing techniques, yields of food per acre soared in the 1970s and by the 1980s, the threat of starvation had receded in most of the world.

Famine again threatens world's poor

Since 1980, world support for agriculture in poor countries has dropped tremendously. Such projects include not only research on pests and crops but also programs to help farmers adopt improved methods in their fields.

• Adjusted for inflation, the World Bank cut its agricultural lending to $2 billion in 2004 from $7.7 billion in 1980.
• The United States cut its support for agriculture in poor countries to $624 million from $2.3 billion (1980-2006).

Another Green Revolution needed

Around 2004, as the world economy began growing more quickly. Millions of people were gaining the money to improve their diets, but the food supply was lagging.

"The world began to use more grain than it was producing, cutting into reserves, and prices started rising. Early this year, as stocks fell to perilous levels, international grain prices doubled or even tripled, threatening as many as 100 million people with malnutrition."

Crop endangering bugs and diseases are quickly becoming immune to insecticides and fungicides. Brown plant hoppers can withstand up to 100 times the dose that used to kill it. Wheat varieties resistant to wheat rust are victim to new varieties of the fungus (read my post on "wheat futures" here)

“We must stay ahead of rapidly evolving pests — and increasingly, a changing climate — to assure global food security,” said Mr. Zeigler, the rice institute’s director. “Cutting back on agricultural research today is pure folly.”

Source article: New York Times

Tags : world food supply, World Bank, wheat, rice, research funding, Nilaparvata lugens, International Rice Research Institute, green revolution, famine, brown leaf hopper

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A study based on the 1959-61 famine in China has shown that babies born into starvation have more than double the risk of developing schizophrenia later in life.

Schizophrenia occurs worldwide in about 1% of the population. For individuals who receive poor fetal nutrition, the risk may be as much as 2.3%.

Researchers in Australia and China studied the incidence of schizophrenia among those born before, during and after the
1959-61 period of famine in the Chinese province of Anhui. Their findings, that rates of schizophrenia jumped 2.3 times, are consistent with a Dutch study that uncovered the same increase for children born during the war-time famine in Holland, from 1944-45. The Chinese study, however, is statistically significant because Anhui's population of nearly 65 million inhabitants is so large.

Scientists still don't understand what causes the increase. "We don't yet know what the component of the nutritional deficiency is, or what the biological mechanism is that takes place in the brain resulting from the deficiency, although pre-natal folate deficiency has been implicated in neural defects in the past," says Feng Zhang at Aberdeen University.

The question remains whether the cause is general lack of nutrition in the womb or the lack of one specific nutrient. It's possible that the gene for schizophrenia is switched "on" or "off" when a chemical group is taken away from an individual's DNA. For example, the lack of folate could interfere with DNA and increase the expression of the gene for schizophrenia.

This may explain why the mental illness survives from generation-to-generation around the world, says Zhang: "There may be an evolutionary advantage for schizophrenia genes during famine."

Schizophrenia remains one of the world's most mysterious mental disorders, difficult to diagnose and sucessfully treat.

Tags : schizophrenia, health, famine, t406t

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