Plant

Plants provide food to humans and all other nonphotosynthetic organisms, either directly or indirectly. Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent of the Near East, where people first cultivated wheat and barley. Scientists believe that as people of the fertile crescent gathered wild seeds, they selected for certain genetically determined traits, which made the plants produced from those seeds more suited for cultivation and as foods. For example, most strains of wild wheat bear their seeds on stalks that break off to disperse the mature seeds. As people selected wild wheat plants for food, they unknowingly selected genetic variants in the wild population whose seed stalks did not break off. This trait made it easier to harvest and cultivate wheat, and is a feature of all of our modern varieties of wheat.

The development of agriculture led to enormous development of human cultures, as well as growth in the human population. This, in turn, spurred new technologies in agriculture. One of the most recent agricultural innovations is the "Green Revolution," the development of new genetic varieties of crop plants. In the past 20-30 years, many new plant varieties have been developed that are capable of very high yields, surely an advantage to an ever-growing human population.

Nevertheless, the Green Revolution has been criticized by some people. One criticism is that these new crop varieties often require large quantities of fertilizers and other chemicals to attain their high yields, making them unaffordable to the relatively poor farmers of the developing world. Another criticism is that the rush to use these new genetic varieties may hasten the extinction of native varieties of crop plants, which themselves have many valuable, genetically-determined characteristics.

Regardless of one's view of the Green Revolution, it is clear that high-tech agriculture cannot provide a simple solution to poverty and starvation. Improvements in our crop plants must surely be coupled to advances in politics and diplomacy to ensure that people of the developing nations are fed in the future.