More Deadly Than the Religous Mythologies of Christianity and Islam

[BSB]

Wheat rust and world farming

Rust in the bread basket

A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas


IT IS sometimes called the “polio of agriculture”: a terrifying but almost forgotten disease. Wheat rust is not just back after a 50-year absence, but spreading in new and scary forms. In some ways it is worse than child-crippling polio, still lingering in parts of Nigeria. Wheat rust has spread silently and speedily by 5,000 miles in a decade. It is now camped at the gates of one of the world’s breadbaskets, Punjab. In June scientists announced the discovery of two new strains in South Africa, the most important food producer yet infected.

Wheat rust is a fungal infection. Its most devastating form (Puccinia graminis) attacks the plant’s stem, forming lethal, scaly red pustules. It has plagued crops for centuries. The Romans deified it, and believed that sacrificing dogs warded it off. It was the worst wheat disease of the first half of the 20th century, killing about a fifth of America’s harvest in periodic epidemics.

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.

http://www.economist.com/node/16481593

[Xavier_Onassis]

This is probably accurate. I recall working on a combine crew in the late 1959, and we were harvesting whet that had been afflicted with rust.  It seems that in that case, it diminished the yield and meant that the equipment needed to be carefully washed. But the wheat was marketable.

[kimba1]

i think it would be worst here if that fungus reaches here. I read somewhere farmers are less inclined now to grow wheat since corn is so vastly profitable. So wheat shortage is very possible in the near future.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Most places where we grow wheat, you cannot grow corn at all. They require a different climate and rain at different times of the year. 

[BSB]

What prompted me to post this was a bit on The Newshour last night. They're working feverishly to come up with a resident seed here in the United States. They've come up with some that appear to be resistent, or partially resistent, and they're being tested in some of the most threatened places in Africa and perhaps elsewhere. It's clearly an ongoing battle though.


BSB