When A New Technology Saved The French Wine Industry

(Science20) - Amy Harmon's excellent, recent article in the New York Times describes how the Florida orange juice industry may soon be wiped-out because of a new bacterial disease spread by an introduced insect.  It looks like there could be a technology-fix for the problem using genetic engineering.  The question is whether the growers will get to apply that solution.

The sort of crisis situation now facing the Florida orange industry is not at all unique in the history of farming.  There have been many times when some new pest  threatened the economic viability of a major crop.  

Sometimes the pest "wins" and a particular farming industry simply goes away.  In the mid 1880s when Coffee Rust made it from Africa to the coffee plantations that supplied England from Java and Sri Lanka, the industry collapsed, and so the English had to switch to tea to get their caffeine.  

When Wheat Stem Rust made it too hard to grow wheat in the Southern colonies of what would later become the US, the farmers shifted their cropping to cotton and tobacco.  That involved much higher labor requirements which in turn lead to the sad institution of slavery in that region.

But there have been other times when some new technological breakthrough has saved a threatened crop, as it possibly could for the Florida orange growers.  I'll give just one example here.