Wheat Rust Confirmed In 7 African, Asian Nations - Pakistan Appearance A "Matter Of Time" - FAO

[hatrack]

Wheat rust once spurred the Green Revolution, the huge increase in crop yields that started in the 1940s. Now it could threaten those great gains. Norman Borlaug, the great American agronomist who died last year, conducted his original research into wheat rust. After ten years of painstaking crossbreeding, he isolated a gene, Sr31 (Sr for stem rust) that resisted P. graminis. By wonderful good fortune, Sr31 also boosted yields (and not only because plants were impervious to rust). Farmers everywhere adopted his seeds enthusiastically, saving millions of lives. So fast did his new varieties spread that by the 1970s, stem rust seemed to have been wiped out. But in 1998 William Wagoire, a pupil of Borlaug’s, was in south-western Uganda researching stripe rust, a less-deadly form of the disease that remains endemic there. While testing a new variety’s resistance, he was alarmed to find stems scarred not by the yellow streaks of stripe rust but the angry pustules of stem rust.

At first neither he nor Borlaug’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in Mexico could believe their eyes: stem rust could not have survived all those years. The awful truth dawned only after a second opinion, by Zak Pretorius of the University of the Free State in South Africa: stem rust had not only lived on in a remote corner of Africa’s Great Lakes. It had evolved to overcome the previously unconquered Sr31. After decades without infection, most of the world’s wheat crop was defenceless.

Wheat rusts spread as billions of spores in the wind. They usually move incrementally, from field to adjoining field, needing wet weather to thrive. But they can make larger leaps. They also mutate as they go. Rust, Borlaug once said, “never sleeps.” The new variant is called Ug99: Ug for its country of origin; 99 for the year it was confirmed. It soon spread to Kenya and Ethiopia. In 2006 it made a leap over the Red Sea into Yemen, where it appeared in a more deadly form. In 2007 it showed up in Iran, apparently blown from Yemen. In June scientists announced they had found four new mutations of rust (making seven in all) and Mr Pretorius confirmed its presence in a harmful form in South Africa.

This could mark a final stage before disaster strikes. Rust’s appearance in South Africa means the disease has pushed deep into the southern hemisphere for the first time. Mr Pretorius worries that westerly winds might blow spores as far as Australia, which is one of the world’s top five wheat exporters. Iran borders Pakistan, which is among the top ten wheat producers and where roughly 100m people depend on the cereal to survive. David Hodson of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Wheat Rust Disease Global Programme thinks it is only a matter of time before Ug99 appears in Pakistan.

EDIT

http://www.economist.com/node/16481593?story_id=16481593

[groovedaddy]

1. This points to why diversity matters so much. The wider the genetic material out there, the greater

the chance that certain ones will survive diseases. The wheat designed to stave off Sr31, strikes me as putting your eggs all in one basket. Don't get me wrong - I'm for cross pollination to get different varieties (but opposed to gmos). But keep the diversity in there. What's happening with wheat proves the necessity of diversity.

[opihimoimoi]

2. This is SERIES SHIT...Millions are at RISK for FAMINE and Misery

[pscot]

3. Stuff like this always makes me think of Brunner.

n/t