Saturday - May 10, 2008

Environmentalist Daydream May Come True: Billions Could Starve

At the very same time that US farmers are cutting wheat production so that they can grow more corn to sell to the government to make ethanol fuel from, a new variety of wheat rust is spreading across a large part of the rest of the world at an alarming rate. Rust is a kind of plant disease. It’s a parasitic fungus that sucks the life out of crops, and causes much lower yields. Rusts spread their spores on the wind. Saddle up the other 3 horses, because it looks like Famine may have his spurs on already.

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.

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.

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

This is not news, but very few people have listened. This rust has been spreading for nearly a decade. There are lots of articles out there giving warning, but if you don’t know about it you will never see them. Here’s one from a year ago:

Billions at risk from wheat super-blight
”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 threat couldn’t have come at a worse time. Consumption has outstripped production in six of the last seven years, and stocks are at their lowest since 1972. Wheat prices jumped 14 per cent last year.

So this horror has come up out of Africa, just like most of the really really nasty germs, and has managed to jump an ocean already, against prevailing winds. From Yemen to Iran in just one year. From Iran it will travel into India, Turkey and Pakistan. From Turkey into Europe and Russia. From Pakistan and India into China. And decimate the crops in all those places. The same places where most of the world’s poor already live. And already live only 3 or 4 meals away from starvation. Places where food riots are already going on, merely because of higher prices. How do think they will react when there simply isn’t any food to buy at any price? Well, at first they’ll be really angry and violent. Soon after that though, they’ll be dead quiet. Where the black horse (Famine) rides, the white horse (Pestilence) follows. And the red horse (war) doesn’t stop the ride; at best he changes its direction.

Can anything be done? Well, those evil White People have been busy in their ivory towers for years now, searching for new varieties of grain that can resist the new rust. One new idea that may work out well (I was going to write “bear fruit” but that would be crass in regards to this story) may be to develop a hybrid wheat that can live fairly well with the rust infection. That lets you fight the devil that you know, instead of using a fully resistant wheat variety that would force the rust fungus to mutate into something new.

Aberdeen scientists are augmenting the overseas tests with additional experiments closer to home. Molecular biologist Eric W. Jackson is putting some promising traditional wheats through their paces to see how plants react to Idaho races of stem rust. Jackson hopes to pinpoint resilient plants that can tolerate a low level of infection. Though infected and colonized by the rust microbe, the ideal plants “wouldn’t have any economic damage,” he says.

It’s a “live and let live” strategy that Jackson says may offer a longer lasting solution than absolute resistance.  “If you go with complete resistance,” he explains, “you’re putting selection pressure -survival of the fittest- on the rust fungus. You’re forcing it to evolve so that it can overcome the plants’ resistance. This pressure means you may end up with a more virulent strain of rust than you had in the first place.”

Partial resistance may be the work of several genes, not just one, he notes. That could further broaden and deepen this eco-friendly defense.

Seeds from the Aberdeen (Idaho) collection are commanding a starring role in Jackson’s tests, just as they are doing in the faraway fields of Africa. Rich and diverse, the collection offers new hope of protecting the world’s amber waves of grain.

My guess is, that without American intervention, gigantic aid packages, and a bio-research effort on a massive scale, that the death tolls will be astronomical. And it may be unstoppable no matter what the West can do. I’d give it ... just a bit more than 4 and a half years.

Here is another source link

an interesting factoid from one of these sources ... rice has not had any rusts for several million years now. 

Posted by Drew458     on 05/10/2008 at 03:01 PM   
Filed Under: • International •  
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