Reporter Lisa Hamilton traveled to a remote corner of Australia to shadow a team of researchers looking to “collect, decode, and define” a hardier strain of wild rice that could help them save what Hamilton calls “the daily sustenance of the world’s poor.” Her story, produced in partnership with FERN, was published online today in the California Sunday Magazine and appears in print Sept. 6.
Geneticists and plant breeders have realized that domesticated rice’s wild relatives hold immense value for their adaptive properties — a value prized in a world experiencing climate change, with increased pests and diseases, and severe weather.
“Instead of being narrowed and homogenized by humans, these crops have produced immeasurable genetic diversity as a result of their natural adaptation to pests, diseases, and climatic fluctuation,” Hamilton writes. “Their genes have already begun to help agriculture tackle the enormous challenges it faces today.”
Cape York, Australia, where the team was working, is a peninsula that is part of the world’s greatest concentration of free-flowing rivers and its most extensive network of intact tropical savannas. This year alone, scientists discovered 13 new spider species there. Roughly the size of Nebraska but with only 17,000 residents, Cape York also is home to significant crocodile and venomous snake populations that the scientists and Hamilton had to dodge.
But Cape York may not hold its wildness for long. Roads that were once rutted and hardly traversable are now being paved, as Australia looks to expand agriculture in the area. “It’s the road to destruction,” the team’s driver, who has explored Cape York for 25 years, tells Hamilton. “The beginning of the end.”