Disruption of supply to affect food security

Wheat is an important source of food and a livelihood for hundreds of millions of people across the world, especially developing countries and any disruption to the supply chain could devastate many countries.
It is for this reason that a new strain of one of the most dangerous pathogens of wheat, first discovered in Uganda in 1999 (thus its scientific name Ug99) and which will almost certainly spread to the rest of the wheat-growing world, could create a serious global food security crisis. After Uganda, the strain surfaced in neigbouring Kenya in 2001 and Ethiopia in 2003.
An expert panel has just completed a study to evaluate the threat of the new wheat stem rust.
Speaking in Nairobi in early September, Prof Ronnie Coffman of Cornell University’s Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics who chaired the panel whose work was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, said the scientific community must collaborate to avert the danger.
“It is only a matter of time until Ug99 reaches across the Saudi Arabian peninsula and into the Middle East, South Asia, and eventually, East Asia and the Americas,” said Coffman.
He said wheat is one of the most important food crops in the world, especially the developing world. “Any disruption to wheat supply could have serious consequences in countries like Pakistan where wheat accounts for 60 percent of the calories and more than 40 percenbt of the protein in the average, daily diet.”
Stem rust has been one of the most feared wheat diseases from as far back as the Roman Empire. Even as late as in the 1950s in North America, stem rust savaged wheat crops. Losses in the past have been as high at 70 percent.
According to Prof Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize winner in science, wheat rust was widespread in the US and Canadian wheat fields in the 1950s and 1960s and it was the development of genetically engineered high yielding wheat cultivars with high level of resistant to stem rust that saved the world from an absolute loss of the crop.
‘‘It was only with the breeding and distribution of varieties resistant to stem rust was the world’s wheat supply spared,’’ Borlaug said.
He said the new strain poses serious threat to small scale farmers who do not have enough financial resources to spray their crops more than once in a season.
The panel of experts says the loss of just a tenth of the global supply would reduce the wheat harvest by 60 million tons, worth more than $9 billion.
The disease is caused by a fungus that spreads its spores on wind currents. Previously, less dangerous strains of rust have spread from eastern Africa all the way to China. The rust spores can also be transported on the clothes and luggage of travelers who have been in areas where the fungus is prevalent.
In its report, the panel of experts makes ten key recommendations necessary to prevent a potential global food catastrophe. Those recommendations will form the mandate of a Global Rust Initiative, an international partnership being led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Organization (EARO).
“For once, Africa can help the rest of the world,” says Dr Marianne Banzinger, the Director of CIMMYT’s African Livelihoods Programme. “There is time to make a difference.”
CIMMYT is an internationally funded, not-for-profit organization that conducts research and training related to maize and wheat throughout the developing world.