The new strain of wheat-stem rust disease threatens world supplies
Pastor Dale Morgan
The new strain of wheat-stem rust disease threatens world supplies*
May 9, 2008
By David R. Sands - A lethal variant on an ancient disease affecting
wheat has spread from its base in Africa to Iran and now threatens vast
fields in South Asia, the Middle East and Europe at a time of global
food shortages, agricultural specialists warn.
The new strain of wheat-stem rust, first identified in Uganda nine years
ago, is threatening crops during a global crisis over rising food
prices, depleted reserves, rising agricultural trade barriers and
violent food-related protests on four continents.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported in early March
that the new wheat fungus had been found in fields in western Iran far
earlier than computer models anticipated, perhaps carried on the high
winds generated by Cyclone Gonu in June. The geographical leap means
that the spread of the disease to countries such as Pakistan and India
may be just a matter of time.
"The detection of the wheat-rust fungus in Iran is very worrisome,"
Shivaji Pandey, director of the FAO's Plant Production and Protection
Division, said in early March. "The fungus is spreading rapidly and
could seriously lower wheat production in countries at direct risk."
Wheat represents nearly a third of the world grain-crop production and a
fifth of the world's caloric intake, but soaring prices and competition
for land from biofuels have left reserves low and prices high. Wheat hit
a record $13.49 a bushel in February, up 67 percent in just 12 months.
In part because of rising global demand, drought and natural disasters,
prices have been soaring for several staple foods, including rice, corn
and soybeans. Many developing countries face intense pressures to
restrain food prices and ensure adequate stocks of staple goods.
The Asian Development Bank said this week that more than 1 billion
Asians may sink back into extreme poverty without extra aid to counter
soaring food prices.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has become increasingly outspoken
about the threat to the international system from the crisis in agriculture.
"If not properly handled, this crisis could cascade into multiple crises
affecting trade, development and even social and political security
around the world. The livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people are
threatened," he told reporters in New York after a fact-finding trip on
the food crisis to Africa and Europe.
The East African stem rust, which is resistant to two main genetic
defenses bred into 90 percent of the world's grain crop, could pose a
greater risk to stability in the Middle East than the Iranian missile
program, the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to
the Middle East Times.
"All these threats pale almost into insignificance by comparison with
the confirmation [that the wheat-rust strain] has crossed the Red Sea,"
the journal said in an editorial last month.
Stem-rust diseases have long been a bane of wheat harvesters. The
ancient Romans prayed to a god named Robigus to protect their crops from
the disease. As recently as the early 1950s, nearly half of the U.S. and
Canadian spring wheat crop was lost to an attack of stem rust.
The "Green Revolution" of the second half of the 20th century benefited
from more productive strands of wheat and from the development of new
wheat variations that were bred specifically to resist stem rust.
U.S. agronomist Norman Borlaug, who earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970
for helping foster the Green Revolution, has been outspoken about the
dangers posed by the new wheat-rust strain.
Mr. Borlaug said the new fungus variations originating in Uganda in 1999
are "much more dangerous" than the earlier stem-rust strains.
"The rust pathogens recognize no political boundaries, and their spores
need no passport to travel thousands of miles in the jet streams," the
94-year-old researcher said at a recent conference on the wheat crisis
in northern Mexico.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last month approved a $26.8 million
grant to Cornell University, working with 15 research partners in
Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and East Asia, to deal with the
global menace.
The research partnership will focus on developing new wheat strains
resistant to the disease.
"Farmers need access to wheat varieties that can resist the new type of
wheat-stem rust, especially in developing nations where reliance on
wheat is high and budgets for fungicides almost nonexistent," Ronnie
Coffman, director of the Cornell project, said in a statement.
Researchers say a solution may be more urgent, given the discovery in
March in Iran.