Quote Originally Posted by selil View Post
Recently at a DHS briefing they talked about something called mono-culture, or the fact that all wheat is basically the same strain and could be taken out by a simple blight (thereby killing a lot of people).
One of the nice things about being an Anthropologist is that our field of study is "humanity" and anything connected with it - that means that we all tend to flow between different research foci and read eclectically.

Mono-culture crops have been a problem even since we stated using horticulture ~12,000 bp. These is excellent evidence that at least one if not two Sumerian (souther Iraq) civilizations collapsed as a result of moo-culture. It is also probable that the Mayan civilization collapsed as a result of it as well. If you want a really good book on the topic, try Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. For a more modern view of the dangers inherent in monocropping in its more modern form, try Jeremy Rifkin's The Biotech Century - it's somewhat out of date, but not bad for a general introduction.