Word: millets
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Thousands of years ago our forebears learned how to domesticate staples such as rice, wheat and millet (as well as such less-well-known grains as amaranth and quinoa), which led in turn to cities, civilization and telemarketing. Packed with complex carbohydrates and essential vitamins such as B and E, grains still account for most of the calories consumed in the world...
...that same painting struck Pa the same way." Van Gogh found landscapes and rural scenes just as uplifting - first Ruisdael and Constable, and then his contemporaries from the Hague School, Josef Israëls, Matthijs Maris, Anton Mauve and their Barbizon-School cousins Charles-François Daubigny and Millet. This makes for a wonderful triple play here, cloud-filled skies sweeping over broad plains painted by three generations: Ruisdael's pastoral View of Haarlem with Bleaching Grounds, Georges Michel's barren and stormy Three Windmills and Van Gogh's powerhouse Wheatfield under Thunderclouds, a swath of chartreuse and emerald...
John Jones, 48, harvested less than half his usual haul of wheat this year. His millet, a grain used in birdseed, hasn't even germinated. The field is an expanse of naked earth surrounded by burned-out pastures. "In June it looked like September, and it's just getting worse," Jones says...
...from the West but to help the developing world build its own biotech infrastructure so it can produce the things it needs the most. "We can't presume that our technologies will bail out poor people in Malawi," he says. "They need their own improved varieties of sorghum and millet, not our genetically improved varieties of wheat and soybeans...
Bioengineering has tremendous potential in the developing world. The U.S., Canada, China and Argentina contain 99% of the global area of genetically modified crops, whereas yields of sorghum and millet in sub-Saharan Africa have not increased since the 1960s. Green groups hoping to earn the trust of the developing world should lobby hard for the resources of Big Agriculture to be plowed into discovering crop varieties that can handle drought and thrive on small-scale farms...