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Nobody thinks about wheat until there isn’t any.

This is how empires crumble, how revolutions spark, how the comfortable illusion of stability shatters like kernels too heat-stressed to fill. We scroll past headlines about heat waves in Horeana, India—127 degrees Fahrenheit, we read, a number that doesn’t compute when we’re standing in air-conditioned supermarkets, choosing between seventeen varieties of bread. But Preetam Singh knows what that number means. He watched it shrivel his wheat crop in 2022, watched his livelihood curl and die in fields that had sustained his family for generations.

Three million metric tons of wheat. That’s what India lost to that single heat wave. Three million tons that didn’t make it to global markets, that forced a nation to halt exports, that rippled through supply chains in ways most of us never noticed—until we did, briefly, when prices jumped, and then we forgot again.

This is the precarity we’ve built our civilization upon: seeds that can’t withstand the world we’re creating.

References:

Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead

The ‘Green Revolution’ transformed global agriculture. Now it’s adapting to climate change.

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