The hunger games that people play
The world will need bumper harvests not just of nectarines and peaches, but of everything and anything edible.
By ET Bureau | Updated:
Agencies
The world needs more crops, and not just per drop, so as to not come a cropper.
Scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, might take note, as part of their wide-ranging research, of Andrew Marvell’s poem about the fruitful garden in which ‘The nectarine and curious peach/ Into my hands themselves do reach’, though their interest would lie not in its literary but in its agrarian implications. The population of an already overburdened Earth is likely to reach some 10 billion by 2050, which will necessitate our growing some 60-80% more food than we currently do. The world will need bumper harvests not just of nectarines and peaches, no matter how curious, but of everything and anything edible that can be induced to crop up out of soil increasingly ravaged by climate change.
The scientists are working on new breeds of ‘superspeed’ seeds that will give an entirely new meaning to fast food by accelerating farm output. While the researchers are hoping soon to export the fruit of their findings to countries such as India, optimism about the outcome should be leavened with caution as suggested by the story of the peasant in Maoist China, who, asked by a Red Guard if he had chanted the thoughts of the Chairman while planting seeds as advised, said he had done so and his harvest could reach God himself. Corrected by the apparatchik that there was no God, the farmer replied, ‘I know. And there’s no harvest either.’
Scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, might take note, as part of their wide-ranging research, of Andrew Marvell’s poem about the fruitful garden in which ‘The nectarine and curious peach/ Into my hands themselves do reach’, though their interest would lie not in its literary but in its agrarian implications. The population of an already overburdened Earth is likely to reach some 10 billion by 2050, which will necessitate our growing some 60-80% more food than we currently do. The world will need bumper harvests not just of nectarines and peaches, no matter how curious, but of everything and anything edible that can be induced to crop up out of soil increasingly ravaged by climate change.
The scientists are working on new breeds of ‘superspeed’ seeds that will give an entirely new meaning to fast food by accelerating farm output. While the researchers are hoping soon to export the fruit of their findings to countries such as India, optimism about the outcome should be leavened with caution as suggested by the story of the peasant in Maoist China, who, asked by a Red Guard if he had chanted the thoughts of the Chairman while planting seeds as advised, said he had done so and his harvest could reach God himself. Corrected by the apparatchik that there was no God, the farmer replied, ‘I know. And there’s no harvest either.’
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