Ploughing more resources into gene-banks would strengthen food security and boost agribusinesses' bottom lines in the long-run
levels and the climate change associated with them portend many problems, but one group of people might be expected to give them a cautious welcome: farmers in Earth’s temperate zones. More COtypically results in more photosynthesis and therefore higher yields, and milder weather means longer growing seasons. Balanced against these potential benefits, however, is the potential for blight.
All crops have wild relatives that are ill-suited to agriculture but which have vastly more genetic diversity than their cultivated cousins. Within theof these wildlings are genes with the potential to grant resistance to future pathogens. As an insurance policy, those genes need to be collected, studied and stored, usually in the form of seeds, until a time comes when a threat arises that requires them to be inserted into the genome of a specific crop. This is being done, but too slowly.
Perhaps that is because the gargantuan task of preparing for all the possible pathogens for all the main crops is too uncertain to be commercially attractive. Wheat alone needs to be tested against hundreds of potential diseases at a range of projected temperature, humidity and COlevels in order to identify the biggest future threats. That done, genes collected from wild species can be inserted into the domestic versions and the experiments run again, to see what works.
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