Ug99 - Black Stem Rust - "Immense Potential For Social & Human Destruction" - Norman Borlaug

[hatrack]

This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction." Startling words - but spoken by the father of the Green Revolution, Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, they are not easily dismissed.

An infection is coming, and almost no one has heard about it. This infection isn't going to give you flu, or TB. In fact, it isn't interested in you at all. It is after the wheat plants that feed more people than any other single food source on the planet. And because of cutbacks in international research, we aren't prepared. The famines that were banished by the advent of disease-resistant crops in the Green Revolution of the 1960s could return, Borlaug told New Scientist.

The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties, and almost no wheat crops anywhere are resistant to it.

The strain has spread slowly across east Africa, but in January this year spores blew across to Yemen, and north into Sudan (see Map). Scientists who have tracked similar airborne spores in this part of the world say it will now blow into Egypt, Turkey and the Middle East, and on to India, lands where a billion people depend on wheat. There is hope: this week scientists are assessing the first Ug99-resistant varieties of wheat that might be used for crops. However, it will take another five to eight years to breed up enough seed to plant all our wheat fields.

EDIT

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19425983.700-billions-at-risk-from-wheat-superblight.html

[kestrel91316]

1. I suggest backyard gardeners pick a couple of wheat varieties

(preferably old heirlooms) to grow in their back yards to keep for seed stock. Along with other veggies and such.

Maybe that stone-age wheat (Einkorn?).

http://www.bountifulgardens.org/
http://www.seedsavers.org/faq.asp
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1996/V3-156.html

[XemaSab]

2. Einkorn to rule them all?

:shrug:

[kestrel91316]

3. Einkorn is stone-age wheat. Probably has some genes we might

find useful some day.

Smartypants.