動画レッスン：The big history of Ukraine and corn

The big history of Ukraine and corn

ウクライナととうもろこしの歴史

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2l1yEcOYbI&t=51s

 

Today, a war in Ukraine means tens of thousands of people in Yemen face starvation.

How did we get here?

How did our global systems of food production become so complex and intertwined?

 

Well, for starters, Ukraine produces 16 percent of global maize exports. Thanks to globalization, the food we eat often comes from or is dependent on faraway places. Unfortunately, the more complex the system gets, the fragile it becomes.

 

All this complexity might seem very recent but it’s the product of a long history.

About 10,000 years ago, people living in southern Mexico gradually began developing this crop. In every society it touched, maize transformed the ways that people lived.

Europeans transported maize across oceans, where new societies adopted and adopted the crop to suit their needs. Millions of people began to rely on it. Today we grow more maize than any other grain. Why? Because there’s corn in everything. We use it for food, in biofuels and ethanol fuel, and all sorts of plastics.

 

As inclusion of maize in varied products has increased in complexity, so has its fragility. If there is a disruption in the supply of maize, dozens of industries in hundreds of countries would falter. As we see to build more resilient systems, maize offers many solutions and challenges.

Our food systems today are incredibly complex and fragile, and corn Is a big part of the long history that brought us here. The decisions we make today about how we grow and how we use corn will be crucial to our future as a species.