People who point out that it is in fact high yield & high risk, tend to be accused of being anti-progress luddites.
There are ways to deal with systemic risk. I think the best defense is to simply stockpile 2+ years of food for every person in the US by saving a portion of the increased yield.
Could infection of the 5 largest wheat-producing countries be done maliciously? If the disease is fungal in nature, what's to stop Joe Terrorist from hopping over to mainland USA or AUS and injecting a few dozen crops, and letting it spread from there over the next 5 years? Can anybody speak to this?
Sure, it could be done, perhaps pretty trivially (from the article it sounds like you'd have to do it when the climate is wet enough), but the US dependence on wheat is more ... say cultural than essential. We produce a lot of other grains, e.g. in my home area of SW Missouri in addition to wheat we produce a lot of dent corn and "milo" (grain sorghum), the latter two for animal fodder. Elsewhere there's a lot of rice grown (e.g. my mom grew up on a Louisiana long grain rice farm).
We've always had the option of "gearing down" and shifting some of the grain from animals to people. Nowadays with something like 1/3 of our corn crop going to ethanol fuel production we're in great shape, at least in terms of being able to provide everyone enough calories.
I hope you like cornbread ^_^.
Seriously, go to this page: http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=5...
Select the US, Production Quantity, year(s) and the grains you're interested in and you'll see as of 2008 that we produced 4.5 times as much corn as we did wheat.
