Really not that damned funny

[reposted from West Coast Stat Views June 2010]

Whenever earmark season comes along opportunistic politicians and their hand-puppet journalists have a grand old time making jokes about the silly things these trivial amounts of money go to. The ones that get the biggest laughs are agricultural earmarks. Here are some comedy stylings of McCain and Dowd. Over half of the earmarks they have fun with involve agriculture and land management.

Today's New York Times has a reminder of what the cost of blights and pests can be:

Lynet Nalugo dug a cassava tuber out of her field and sliced it open.
Inside its tan skin, the white flesh was riddled with necrotic brown lumps, as obviously diseased as any tuberculosis lung or cancerous breast.
“Even the pigs refuse this,” she said.
The plant was what she called a “2961,” meaning it was Variant No. 2961, the only local strain bred to resist cassava mosaic virus, a disease that caused a major African famine in the 1920s.
But this was not mosaic disease, which only stunts the plants. Her field had been attacked by a new and more damaging virus named brown streak, for the marks it leaves on stems.
That newcomer, brown streak, is now ravaging cassava crops in a great swath around Lake Victoria, threatening millions of East Africans who grow the tuber as their staple food.
Although it has been seen on coastal farms for 70 years, a mutant version emerged in Africa’s interior in 2004, “and there has been explosive, pandemic-style spread since then,” said Claude M. Fauquet, director of cassava research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “The speed is just unprecedented, and the farmers are really desperate.”
Two years ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation convened cassava experts and realized that brown streak “was alarming quite a few people,” said Lawrence Kent, an agriculture program officer at the foundation. It has given $27 million in grants to aid agencies and plant scientists fighting the disease.
The threat could become global. After rice and wheat, cassava is the world’s third-largest source of calories. Under many names, including manioc, tapioca and yuca, it is eaten by 800 million people in Africa, South America and Asia.

Maybe it's just me but I really don't see what's so funny about agricultural research. Perhaps Maureen can explain it to me.